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31 May, 2022
Court Hears Parents’ Challenge to School District’s Secretive Transgender Policy
For the past two years, 14 parents have been fighting to protect their children and retain their rightful authority over them within the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin over the district’s secretive transgender policy. The policy ordered teachers to hide children’s gender identity issues from their parents and to affirm the children’s chosen identities at school.
On Tuesday, attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and Alliance Defending Freedom presented oral arguments on behalf of those parents at the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
“We asked the court to recognize that parents have the right to direct the upbringing of their children,” Luke Berg, attorney at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, told The Daily Signal. “Yet the Madison Metropolitan School District is deceiving parents and excluding them from important decisions about the well-being of their children. We are optimistic that the court will do what is right and protect the safety of children and the rights of parents.”
Attorneys filed the original lawsuit, Doe v. Madison Metropolitan School District, in February 2020. In late September 2020, a state court in Wisconsin issued an order prohibiting the school district from intentionally deceiving parents about their children’s activities—especially if a child was struggling with gender identity issues.
Madison is the second-largest school district in Wisconsin, with approximately 27,000 students attending 52 schools. A few years ago, the district adopted a policy that promoted both transgender ideology and gender fluidity and that undermined parental rights, all in one guideline.
Here’s how it worked: Teachers were required to fill out a “Gender Support Plan” form for any child who expressed gender dysphoria or who asked to have a transgender treatment plan. Plans included changing the name and pronouns a child was called at school without the parents’ knowledge.
Under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, parents have the express right to review any school records about their children, but because of the way this form was intentionally designed, they were prohibited from viewing, or even knowing about, the Gender Support Plan.
The school administration had to be creative to determine how to work around the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Under the law, parents can’t access a teacher’s “personal” notes about a student. So, a section of the Gender Support Plan informed teachers to file the plan in the teacher’s “personal” file, not in student records, so it remained exempt from federal law and out of sight from parents.
The policy also said: “School staff shall not disclose any information that may reveal a student’s gender identity to others, including parents or guardians and other school staff unless legally required to do so.”
As I wrote in 2020, “In the Madison school district, a child could go to school as a girl named ‘Lindsay,’ but spend the day as a boy named ‘Liam.’ The child could go to the restroom alongside boys, change in the locker room with boys, and be known by friends and teachers as ‘Liam.’ But Lindsay’s parents, who gave birth to and are raising a girl named Lindsay, would have no idea.”
The fact that teachers were encouraged to keep a child’s gender identity struggles secret—as if the parents are the enemy and have no natural and legal right to this information—and that the district sneakily worked around a specific federal law banning this kind of secrecy is reprehensible.
The complaint describes the unethical policy thusly: “Parents’ rights cases have established that parents have the primary role in directing the upbringing of their children, especially in significant decisions (like health care), and that the government may not supplant parents simply because a parent’s decision is not agreeable to the child.”
Parental rights are the foundation of healthy families and a thriving society. School systems are but a tool to help educate children when parents are unable to do so themselves. Education should be the priority in this school district and all others. The priority should not be setting up illegal guidelines to keep vital information secret from parents or purposely encouraging kids toward concepts of gender fluidity.
Helping kids embrace or manifest a transgender-friendly persona through different attire, hormones, or changes in name and personal pronouns has replaced a school’s original goal: education. This is both wrong and misguided. Schools, parents, and kids should be allies, not foes. Hopefully, the Wisconsin Supreme Court agrees.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/27/court-hears-parents-challenge-to-school-districts-secretive-transgender-policy
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US Schools Facing Mass Exodus of Teachers Who Won’t Return This Fall
With the end of the academic year in sight, an overwhelming number of educators are planning to close the book on their teaching careers.
Much of this stems from post-pandemic classroom behavioral challenges with students and ongoing staff shortages that create excessive workloads for teachers.
Many educators who have 25 years or more under their belt are opting to retire, but even less seasoned ones are walking away and choosing different career paths.
Back in February, the National Education Association (NEA) released a study conducted by GBAO Strategies that revealed a startling 55 percent of teachers planned to leave their profession ahead of schedule.
The NEA is the most prominent teachers union in the United States and represents 3 million educators.
Widespread educator shortages pre-date the arrival of COVID-19, but the pandemic also served as the last straw for many, kicking off the trend of an early departure.
A RAND study from January 2021 showed nearly a quarter of those surveyed expressed the desire to quit after just one year of teaching during the pandemic.
The average national turnover rate was only 16 percent before COVID-19. However, in 2021, that number jumped to 25 percent.
This year, 80 percent of NEA members reported that unfilled job openings at schools have led to more work obligations for the educators who’ve chosen to stay in their profession.
“I think people are leaving because it’s all too much. It’s a firestorm. It’s all eroding,” Heidi Rickard told The Epoch Times.
Rickard has been an educator since 1999. After spending some time teaching in Colorado Springs, she put down roots in the Alameda Unified school district in the San Francisco bay area.
She explained that many veteran teachers “just can’t take it” anymore and are leaving due, in part, to the scale of mental health challenges students brought back to the classroom after two years of online learning.
“As a veteran teacher, when the best of my best isn’t working, that’s so defeating,” Rickard said.
Two years of excessive screen time at home and the disengagement of online learning have left students struggling, falling behind, and adrift in a sea of depression.
COVID-19 and its subsequent restrictions created a mental health crisis for youth, which is now manifesting as aggressive or excessively troublesome behavior in the classroom.
In October 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association acknowledged the pandemic-fueled decline in child and adolescent mental health had become a national emergency.
And the dire shortage of counselors in school districts to assist students has added to this.
Rickard noted, “We haven’t had a counselor all year. Nobody even applied.”
Findings from a joint study on the role of school counselors from the Connecticut State Department of Education, the Connecticut School Counselor Association, and the Center for School Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed schools with fewer students and more counselors had lower rates of student suspensions and disciplinary actions.
Former superintendent, educator, and school counselor Gary Marks spent decades working in Nebraska schools. He agreed that student counseling and support for teachers in the classroom have hit a critical point.
“You need way more counselors when you’re having all these mental health issues,” Marks told The Epoch Times.
For example, he pointed to where his grandchildren go to school in Tennessee’s Farragut school district, which has only two counselors for about 600 students.
He also thinks a general lack of respect for educators underscores why more are leaving their jobs early, and others are reluctant to apply.
“The respect situation is just a huge issue,” he said.
Marks was candid when asked about the difficulties of hiring new talent in schools. “I don’t know right now, given the way the world is, if I’d be interested in being a classroom teacher.”
Yet the struggle to keep existing educators and hire new ones is only half the battle. A new report from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education indicates that university students pursuing teaching degrees are declining.
In 2019, U.S. colleges awarded fewer than 90,000 undergraduate degrees in education. That’s down from nearly 200,000 a year in the 1970s. Over the past 10 years alone, the number of people completing traditional teacher preparation programs has dropped by 35 percent.
“This is a five-alarm crisis,” said NEA president Becky Pringle.
One of the hurdles administrators face amid the staff scarcity is a lengthy certification and training process even after qualified university graduates apply to teach.
“I want to continue teaching—however, I’m being forced out,” Lisa Carley Hotaling told The Epoch Times.
Having taught in Michigan and New York, Hotaling found herself between a rock and a hard place after she took a teaching job in California as an emergency hire in the Alameda Unified school district.
Despite already having a master’s degree and more than a decade of education and classroom experience, she still has to take the California Basic Skills Test (CBEST) and go back to school specifically for her master’s in education to continue teaching.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-schools-facing-mass-exodus-of-teachers-who-wont-return-this-fall_4492739.html
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Woke Toronto college forces students to sign waiver acknowledging how they benefited from the 'colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples' before they can enter Zoom class
A woke college in Canada is requiring students to sign a statement acknowledging land grabs from indigenous Canadians before they can attend their online classes.
George Brown College in Toronto, like many universities, requires students to sign an IT department waiver acknowledgment before utilizing the school's online services.
However, the IT statement does not address internet safety or online protocols, but instead talks about how the territory George Brown College operates on belongs to the Huron-Wendat, Mississaugas, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples.
It also states that immigrants and settlers benefited from the 'colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples' who were native to the land.
'It is imperative that we constantly engage in acts of awareness and decolonization,' the statement added.
The college alleges the statement aims to educate students, not force them to agree with its ideals.
'By selecting "I agree," you are indicating your acknowledgment to of this statement,' the document reads. 'Our intent is not to impose agreeance, but to inform through acknowledgement. This acknowledgement is to generate awareness and offer opportunities for personal reflection.'
The statement also states that the college 'acknowledges the all Treaty peoples,' which it claims includes those who came to Canada involuntarily through slavery.
The school reportedly wants students to acknowledge that the land on which George Brown College resides is subject of the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, a law that details an agreement for sharing territory among two or more nations.
Per the IT statement, entities operating in the territory are supposed to work together to 'peacebly care' for the land and 'share' the resources around the Great Lakes.
The statement, which was shared on Twitter, has been met with criticisms.
'So just to be clear, you need to click "agree" on the statement that you are benefitting from genocide,' Quillette editor Jonathan Kay penned.
'What if someone just doesn't agree there have been humans in North America "since time immemorial"? I suppose they're expected to click cancel,' one user tweeted.
'I could almost deal with their statement, but this part is about engaging in resistance is beyond the pale,' added another.
'So what good is a statement when you can give the land back, which I’m sure would be greatly appreciated?' Jeffrey Churchill wrote.
One user added: 'Okay and what is “displanted”? Some kind of neologism for displaced? The need to endlessly invent jargon to signal special meaning to group insiders is truly astonishing. I’m sure your in “agreeance” with that.'
It is unclear if George Brown College has any other indigenous people-focused documents as the school did not immediately respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10868421/Woke-Toronto-college-asks-students-agree-benefitted-genocide-indigenous-Canadians.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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30 May, 2022
Eight British universities under investigation for giving students useless businress degrees
<i>Business degrees are mostly BS so this is about time</i>
Eight universities are under investigation by the higher education watchdog for offering poor quality degrees. The institutions will now be investigated by the Office for Students (OfS), which could result in fines being issued or student loan funding being withdrawn.
It is the first time that the regulator has dispatched inspectors to universities to inspect the quality of courses and comes amid mounting concern that students are not getting value for money.
Degrees with high drop-out rates and low levels of graduate employment are being targeted by the OfS for scrutiny, as well as those which are substituting face-to-face learning with substandard online classes.
All the courses under investigation are business and management degrees, five of which have a dropout rate of more than 40 per cent.
The investigation could result in these courses being barred from receiving student loan funding, which would most likely render them financially unviable.
Whitehall officials are concerned at the cost to the taxpayer of the increasing number of pupils who take up a place at university, but fail to earn enough to pay back their student loan.
Ministers have been particularly critical of so-called “Mickey Mouse” degrees, which saddle students with debt but add little to their job prospects. They have previously accused universities of running “threadbare” courses in a rush to get “bums on seats”.
Michelle Donelan, the universities minister, told The Telegraph it is “completely wrong” to think that simply sending more students to university will help boost social mobility.
“There is an undeniable link between quality and social mobility. We need to ensure [students] can choose a course and it will lead them on to a good outcome. That is real social mobility,” she said.
“For too long, we have got obsessed with the idea if you get people to university, that is a social mobility job done, whereas that is completely wrong. It is lazy social mobility.
“Real social mobility is about getting them to complete their course and getting them into a graduate job that they wouldn’t have done had they not done this course.”
Ms Donelan said that this is just the first wave of university course inspections and that more will follow in June and July.
Inspectors will consider the effectiveness of course teaching and students’ contact hours, as well as if students receive “sufficient” learning resources and academic support, with experienced academics leading the inspections.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/26/eight-universities-investigation-giving-students-poor-quality/
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Now We Have Teachers Asking Students How Comfortable They Are About Graphic Sex Acts
Okay, I mean what is going on here? As if things can’t get any worse in our schools regarding all this woke nonsense and critical race theory fraud in the curriculum, we have graphic questions about the level of comfortability regarding sexual activity. Was this survey given to little kids? No, not this time at least. It was high schoolers, but still—what are we doing here giving these so-called educators a pass if they’re asking students how comfortable they are with anal sex. Are parents okay with them asking their kids about their masturbation preferences because that was also on the sheet? In Canada, an equally graphic survey was given to kindergartners.
Libs of Tik Tok was there to uncover this madness:
Students at Campolino High School in California were reportedly given an invasive and inappropriate sex lesson which included questions about their anal sex and masturbation preferences.
In this worksheet, students were asked to rate their comfort level with anal sex. Presumably, these written responses were turned in by each student, so the school now has their anal sex preferences on file.
[…]
Students were also asked if they like to masturbate with others in the room.
Libs of TikTok spoke with a parent who expressed horror that a school would be collecting such information from a teenager. The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us the school didn’t want parents to see the material.
Nothing wrong with talking about masturbation in a high school health class, but lines are crossed when you ask kids if they like to do it in front of others. Who wrote that question? Louis C.K.? And the schools know they’re crossing the line again of course. It just amazes me that these clowns dole out tons of graphic surveys and hope no parent will ever see it. In the social media age, nothing remains secret for long.
Libs of Tik Tok added that this school also hands out “trans tape” so girls can tape their chests. Boys are also given the tape for “tucking” as well. Republicans have a massive opportunity here with swaths of suburban parents who could move these areas back into play, but they can’t overreach. These are moderates politically. No hardcore MAGA stuff, sadly—but returning common sense to the classroom sells. It worked in Virginia. It can work in the Philly suburbs and other areas where national elections are decided.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/05/26/oh-good-now-we-have-teachers-asking-students-how-comfortable-they-are-about-gra-n2607850
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Australia: A high school has come under fire for showing students a video that discussed pornography in such graphic detail that some students walked out
Wadalba Community School on the Central Coast in NSW was conducting the monthly year 10 assembly on Monday when without warning, students were shown a TEDx Talk on video by sexual health expert Ran Gavrieli entitled 'Why I stopped watching porn'.
The video sees Gavrieli discuss different types of online pornography online to try and understand the question, 'What would porn deem as sexual?'
In the talk Mr Gavrieli claimed it was 'whatever men find arousing'.
'If men find it arousing to choke a woman, to have brutal sex without one touch, hug, kiss, tender caress? Well, then it is sexual,' Mr Gavrieli said in the video.
'It arouses men to see a woman or a child cry? It is sexual. It arouses men to rape a woman? Well, then it is sexual.'
In attempting to explain the aim of cameras in pornography, Mr Gavrieli added 'porn cameras have no interest in capturing any normal sensual activities such as petting, caressing, making out, touching, hugging, kissing – no, what porn cameras are into is the penetration.'
This video - reportedly shown without warning or context - caught a number of students aged between 14 and 15 off guard and even left some students in tears as a result, reported the Daily Telegraph.
One 14-year-old student claimed that she had been a victim of rape at a party earlier this year and that the graphic detailed descriptions of porn, in particular rape, had been were 'triggering'.
'I went to the bathroom straight after because I was throwing up,' she said. 'They could have at least separated the girls and boys or given a trigger warning especially while talking about rape.'
Another eight girls are understood to have walked out.
The school's principal Melinda Brown has subsequently written to parents to 'unreservedly apologise' for the incident and admitted the lesson breached Department of Education guidelines.
'I apologise unreservedly for this lesson going ahead without first informing you and providing you with the option to remove your child from this lesson,' Ms Brown wrote.
'I want to assure you the incident does not reflect the high standards and care of students that Wadalba Community School upholds at all other times.
A spokesperson for the department stated that 'the school did not follow Department policy and the incident does not reflect the high standards required by the Department.'
'The matter has been referred to the Department's Professional and Ethical Standards Directorate for investigation.'
'The Department apologises unreservedly for any distress caused and counselling is being offered to the students involved.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10862411/NSW-high-school-apologises-showing-year-10-students-graphic-video-talk-pornography.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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29 May, 2022
Meet The Billionaires’ Club Pumping Critical Race Theory Into Your Child’s Classroom
A decade ago, when an Obama-era initiative called “Common Core” convinced 41 states to give up control of their education standards, it was infamously the result of a massive influence campaign by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, with America’s K-12 landscape being turned upside down by “equity” initiatives that divide children by ethnicity and devalue rigorous academics, the culprit is much the same: Gates and other philanthropic foundations.
That’s a takeaway from the two years I spent poring through educational and financial records for my new book, “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” These philanthropic foundations are perhaps the most powerful and least understood force in American politics — and a key node in moving critical race theory from academic papers to society. Pick any radical racial initiative in your child’s school, and it is likely to tie back to the Ford, Kellogg, Gates, Annie E. Casey, MacArthur, or Surdna foundations.
Take the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 2019 New York Times series-turned-grade school curriculum. It might never have seen the light of day if not for the MacArthur Foundation.
In 2014, MacArthur awarded a $1 million, three-year grant to ProPublica, a left-wing nonprofit news outlet for which Hannah-Jones wrote about race. In 2017, MacArthur awarded Hannah-Jones a “$625,000, no-strings-attached grant.”
In “How the 1619 Project Came Together,” the Times explained that Hannah-Jones consulted with “Kellie Jones, a Columbia University art historian and 2016 MacArthur Fellow.” Matthew Desmond, who contributed an article about the “brutality of American capitalism” to the series, was a 2015 MacArthur fellow.
The nonprofit that pushed curriculum based on the 1619 Project into schools is also funded by MacArthur. In 2021, MacArthur secured a position for Hannah-Jones as a professor at Howard University, where she would teach her racial ideas and continue the 1619 Project, by donating $5 million to the school.
The Kellogg Foundation bankrolls the group behind the Zinn Education Project (named after anti-American author Howard Zinn), which is relied on by a company that produces content for 90 percent of K-12 schools. In one lesson plan, the teacher stages a “tribunal” to decide who should be held “accountable” for Covid-19, tells students it should not be China, and leads them to order that “all members of the [U.S.] federal government [be put] in jail” to “end, or lower the amount of, capitalism so no secrets are present.”
Even groups that exist to get government officials on the same page, such as the National School Boards Association (which likened parents to “domestic terrorists”), receive private funds from foundations like Ford, Gates, and Carnegie.
Making it even creepier, far-left foundations have converged through a group called Arabella, a for-profit company that brings them together alongside groups like the American Federation of Teachers union. Teachers union honcho Randi Weingarten said of one Arabella initiative, fittingly called “The Hub Project”: “It essentially creates a place to have a shared strategy on issues with groups that might seem disparate.”
Arabella is the same group that The New York Times conceded in January has led Democrats to dwarf Republicans with the “dark money” leftists publicly denounce. One tentacle of Arabella, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, spent more in 2020 than the Democratic National Committee.
You likely don’t know the name Arabella, or the names of its main nonprofits like the Sixteen Thirty Fund, because they specialize in creating pop-up astroturf fronts, which operate with little financial disclosure and with scant public recognition of where they’re coming from.
But these groups have been sowing the seeds of critical race theory in obscure educational bureaucracies since long before you even heard the term. In 2013, New Venture Fund, one of Arabella’s most important arms, outright paid for the creation of a federal government entity, the “Equity and Excellence Commission,” which pushed for a return to 1970s-style bussing.
Savvy activists strategically fund force-multipliers: behind-the-scenes groups that shape others who go on to shape others. For those seeking to efficiently spread fringe ideas, there is no better bang for the buck than conscripting schoolchildren. But once I saw who was behind the curtain, it became clear why they hid.
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/26/meet-the-billionaires-club-pumping-critical-race-theory-into-your-childs-classroom
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Biden ATF pick opposed arming teachers
President Joe Biden’s second pick to head the nation’s gun regulating agency opposed training and arming teachers with military or police backgrounds, an issue likely to be raised at a Senate confirmation hearing today.
In his failed 2018 bid for Ohio attorney general, Steve Dettelbach, nominated to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, opposed arming teachers, claiming that it is a “politician’s plan” that some police opposed.
It is one strongly endorsed by some key officials in Texas who yesterday said it could have lessened the tragic slayings of young children and a teacher at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
As the death count mounted yesterday, for example, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reiterated his call to arm teachers as the best way to stop or delay a school shooting until police arrive.
"The reality is, we don't have the resources to have law enforcement at every school," he said on Fox. "It takes time for law enforcement, no matter how prepared, no matter how good they are to get there. So, having the right training for some of these people at the school is the best hope,” he added.
Sen. Ted Cruz also called for armed school guards. "We know from past experience that the most effective tool for keeping kids safe is armed law enforcement on the campus," Cruz told a gaggle of reporters.
The push for arming teachers is not new, though it is picking up support from more experts.
Public interest law professor John Banzhaf, among the first to suggest arming airline pilots, said today that training and arming some teachers is a public safety issue.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/biden-atf-pick-opposed-arming-teachers
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Cambridge don claims woke critics have labelled him a 'white supremacist' for teaching classics
Dr David Butterfield has warned of the ‘political danger’ and ‘threats’ to his academic discipline amid rising numbers of woke rows on campuses.
The senior lecturer in classics says his subject at Cambridge has even been accused of supporting ‘some shadowy ill-identified cabal of far-Right extremists’.
He added: ‘Folks who want to defend the moral neutrality and political independence of looking at the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms, receive the slogan of the day, which is to be a white supremacist.
‘White supremacy is now used as a term for those who defend the intellectual value of studying Greece and Rome in a geographically, technically, culturally, separate discipline. Or those who believe in the very existence of the concept which is Western civilisation.’
Dr Butterfield, fellow and director of studies in Classics at Queens’ College, was speaking at a debate on academic freedoms in universities held by think-tank Politeia this week.
He said it was wrong to hold the Greeks, Romans and other ancient civilisations to the same moral standard as the present day.
Criticising the current trend for decolonisation, Dr Butterfield added: ‘Decolonisation doesn’t mean anything of any intellectual value in the context of studying the ancient Greeks and Romans on their own terms.’
He attacked the ‘phenomenon of activist scholarships’, whereby academics and students want to use their research or scholarships to push their political agendas.
A small minority of political activists have succeeded in shutting down any dissent from woke orthodoxy.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10862647/Cambridge-don-claims-woke-critics-branded-white-supremacist-teaching-classics.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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27 May, 2022
Calling Us Terrorists Wasn’t Enough: NSBA Wanted Military to Crack Down on Concerned Parents
Parental rights in education is not domestic terrorism. Any organization that says otherwise should have no influence over public policy whatsoever.
And yet, in a first draft of a letter to President Joe Biden, the National School Boards Association requested the Army National Guard and military police to monitor parents in school board meetings. Why? Because parents voicing concern about woke curriculum is tantamount to “domestic terrorism.”
When I read that I thought, “This has to be a joke.” The National Guardsmen would die of boredom. Parents are not a threat to national security, and we have a right to have our voices heard.
I myself am a parent who has been very concerned about what my child is exposed to when she goes to school. In fact, I filed public record requests with my school district last year to find out if critical race theory was being taught in the classroom. As a result, I was sued by a teachers union, the National Education Association Rhode Island, and its local branch, the National Education Association South Kingstown.
On top of that, I, along with many parents across the country, were labeled “domestic terrorists” by the FBI—at the request of the National School Boards Association.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I’d be called a domestic terrorist. It’s laughable that while begging my 3-year-old to eat his broccoli and coaxing my 6-year-old to start her bath, I would be on some FBI watch list. But, thanks to the National School Boards Association and Department of Justice, that’s exactly what moms like myself were labeled in October 2021.
How did wanting transparency in education become dangerous extremism? When did parents being involved in their child’s education become a concerning trend for federal law enforcement—let alone the military?
I hope that any American soldier receiving orders to loom in the tater tot-scented cafeteria of a middle school, monitoring mothers opposing equity initiatives and mask policies, would be too embarrassed to follow such blatantly unconstitutional orders. Surely our military is not so cuckolded that its last effective function is harassing moms.
The fact that the National School Boards Association’s interim director, Chip Slaven, even considered militarizing school boards speaks volumes to the fundamentally disconnected nature of the association and organizations like them, which exist only with the consent of the taxpayers it targeted.
Twenty-three states have ended their membership with the National School Boards Association, and it’s time the remaining states disband for the sake of parental rights in education. The threat to parents’ free speech will permanently linger as long as the National School Boards Association exists.
The only threats I make are for timeouts and early bedtime. I also count to three a lot, and my kindergartner finds that very threatening. The National School Boards Association, however, colluded with the FBI to threaten my constitutional rights. Most of the “threats” cited in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memo weren’t even legitimate threats of violence. It’s clear where the real threat lies here.
My own state of Rhode Island is one of those remaining states clinging to National School Boards Association membership. In fact, the Rhode Island Association of School Committees’ executive director, Tim Duffy, was so gleeful about targeting parents that he immediately galvanized his Rhode Island school committee membership.
The day after Garland released his memo, Duffy emailed Rhode Island school committee officials stating that the Rhode Island Association of School Committees would coordinate with the FBI and U.S. attorney general for Rhode Island. He directed school committees to report to him “any issues you have had during your school committee meetings.”
Well, this certainly must have been an exciting turn of events for a boring executive director of a nonprofit! One day you’re writing model school board policies, and the next you’re an FBI-deputized bounty hunter of moms. Who can resist such a power rush? Well, 23 other school board associations resisted it. I’m sorry to say my expectations for the Rhode Island Association of School Committees are terribly low, at least under the leadership of Duffy.
Now, it’s easy to view this National School Boards Association debacle as a story unique to public education, but it is not a standalone event.
An investigation into the events surrounding the September 2021 letter from the National School Boards Association concluded that “lack of internal controls” at the association and an aimless board of directors were to blame for the association’s recklessness, but this targeting of parents is not simply the result of its disorganized workplace and lack of leadership. This is a culmination of the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to identify political dissidents and weaponize government power to silence their dissent.
The same ideological opponents in the military were purged under the pretext of fighting extremism. For the Biden administration, parents are just more “enemies [that] lie within our own ranks” and pose a threat to keeping America “safe.” This notion cannot stand and will die only with the dissolution of the National School Boards Association.
Parents aren’t thinking about upcoming elections when they oppose racialized and sexualized curriculum in school. They’re thinking about the welfare of their kids. It’s not a political ploy to want to know what your child is being taught in school. It’s a parental right.
Under the regime of the National School Boards Association, parents will always be viewed as domestic terrorists because their objections threaten the ideology of a politicized public education regime. Parents haven’t made physical threats of violence. Any perceived threat by parents is a threat to an ideology. And those are absolutely permissible.
The good news is that the Biden administration and the National School Boards Association drastically underestimated the resiliency of American parents.
As for myself, parenting a 3-year-old and 6-year-old has equipped me for dealing with my local school board and other anti-parent groups. Both deal in tantrums, emotional manipulation, and fear tactics; both require constant attention and coddling; and both need timeouts. The National School Boards Association needs a permanent timeout.
When parents were first threatened with federal investigations in 2021, my response was “arrest me!” Had the military actually been deployed to school board meetings, parents still would not have been shaken.
Nevertheless, the power and control of local school boards must be restored to elected representatives, unencumbered by special-interest groups like the National School Boards Association hijacking public education to impose its progressive political agenda.
This restoration will be a long haul because the National School Boards Association is not the only special-interest group leeching off public education tax dollars. Teachers unions, consulting agencies, and equity grifters have been riding that public education gravy train for decades. Now that the National School Boards Association has overreached, we must hold it accountable by demanding more than empty mea culpas. Some things you can’t come back from.
If colluding with the FBI to investigate innocent parents after seriously considering siccing the Army National Guard and military police on school board meetings is forgivable, then there are no bounds to government abuse of power. A society that values freedom and government restraint cannot tolerate the continued existence of the National School Boards Association.
President Harry Truman said in a special message to Congress in 1950, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens, creating a country where everyone lives in fear.”
The National School Boards Association has shown itself to be that source of terror. It is now falling apart, and with its radical views, it should be.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/25/calling-us-terrorists-wasnt-enough-nsba-wanted-military-to-crack-down-on-concerned-parents
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Nevada mom goes viral after school board cuts her mic during meeting
<i>She was reading an explicit passage from an assignment approved for the classroom</i>
An emotional Nevada mom has gone viral after school board officials cut her mic temporarily as she read sexually explicit passages from a class assignment given to her high school daughter.
Las Vegas news outlet KTNV confirmed Wednesday that Kandra Evans is the mother seen telling a Clark County School District board meeting that a teacher required her 15-year-old daughter to memorize the “pornographic” material for a class assignment.
“This will be horrifying for me to read to you, but that will give you perspective on how she must have felt when her teacher required her to memorize this and to act it out in front of her entire class,” Ms. Evans says in a video of Thursday’s school board meeting that has taken off on social media.
The video shows her becoming emotional as she begins reading from the materials in her hands: “I don’t love you. It’s not you, it’s just, I don’t like your d—- — or any d—- in that case. I cheated, Joe.”
“Forgive me, we’re not using profanity,” the board’s chairwoman Irene Cepeda interrupted, as Ms. Evans’ microphone seemed to be cut off briefly.
Another school board member called for “decorum” and told Ms. Evans not to “engage with the audience.”
The mother responded: “If you don’t want me to read it to you, what was it like for my 15-year-old daughter to have to memorize pornographic material and memorize it?”
After the exchange, school board officials allowed Ms. Evans to finish her remarks, which took up nearly four minutes of the meeting.
“We have pornography laws regarding minors in this state and many of those were violated because of this assignment,” Ms. Evans said, adding that she didn’t have time to name all of them.
The exchange went viral after Libs of Tik Tok, a popular social media account, posted a video excerpt Monday.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/may/18/nevada-mom-goes-viral-after-school-board-cuts-her-/
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Texas teen arrested at school with pistol and toy AR-15 day after Uvalde shooting
Texas police arrested a boy in posession of an AK-47-style pistol and a toy AR-15-style rifle at school on Wednesday, the day after a mass shooting in the state left 21 dead at an elementary school in the small town of Uvalde.
Police were called on Wednesday morning in the town of Richardson, a Dallas suburb, on reports that a male was seen walking towards Berkner High School holding what looked like a rifle.
“Within minutes of the call being dispatched, numerous police officers from various units within the Richardson Police Department responded to Berkner High School and initiated a search and investigation into this incident,” Richardson Police said in a statement on Facebook.
The teen, whose identity has not been released due to his age, was located inside the school, and his car contained “what appeared to be an AK-47 style pistol and a replica AR-15 style Orbeez rifle.”
The youth was charged with unlawful carrying weapons in a weapon-free school zone, a state felony.
A Volkswagen Jetta was seen being towed from the school as police investigated, Fox 4 reports.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/uvalde-shooting-richardson-texas-rifle-b2087595.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=IND_Morning_Headlines%2026-05-2022&utm_term=IND_Headlines_Masterlist_CDP
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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26 May, 2022
After Texas school shooting, teachers weigh in on how to stop the violence
After a school shooting in Udvale, Texas left 19 children and two teachers dead, schools across the country ramped up security measures, and teachers weighed in on how to prevent future gun violence.
James. E. Fury, a Wisconsin public school teacher, suggested the key to generating peace is fixing the environment.
"My thoughts on school shootings in general is that people don't commit these acts when they feel like they belong, so creating environments in which everyone feels that will likely result in less shootings," Fury told Fox News Digital.
Fury also advocated for better follow through when it comes to persons who frequently find themselves in the hands of law enforcement, only to be released and commit more crime.
"It has also become apparent that many of these shooters have been engaged by law enforcement previously," he noted. "There is some sort of failure occurring between that contact and the follow through with what to do with a person who is frequently in trouble or threatening others, or acting in a disturbed manner. We don't seem to have great answers in this country for how to deal with mental health issues, and the ‘visibility’ of this mental illness hasn't done anything to slow its occurrence."
High school teacher Daniel Buck similarly told Fox News Digital that "what unites all of these mass shooters are their identities as loners."
"Their politics and self-reported justifications are all over the place," Buck said. "But each one lacks social connections, involvement in school programs, church attendance, or any other institutional involvement. It's a cultural cause that finds expression through tragic acts of gun violence."
The solutions are, he said, are "unfortunately, long-term."
"A re-emphasis on family, church, social connections, and distance from social media," Buck suggested. "These trends have been decades in the making and so will take decades to reverse."
The short-term mitigation measures, he said, should focus on enhanced security measure and spending on school safety.
Christopher Maraschiello, who has taught middle school and high school history for nearly three decades, said generally speaking his buildings are "fairly safe."
"We have a full-time school resource officer who is from the community and who knows most of our kids.," he told Fox News Digital.
"There are a lot of politicians in this country today mostly of my own party that have a lot to answer for," he said. "Texas for one thing is just the poster child for out-of-control gun rights. I am a historian, so I can tell you that gun violence in America is not a new thing at all. The problem is the internet, social media, violent video games, and a 24-hour news cycle plus all of the regular pressures and undiagnosed mental illness this is a huge problem."
Payge Guenzler, a teacher in Montana, called on parents to become more involved in their children's lives.
"What happened today in Texas was horrible," she wrote on Facebook. "As a society we can start blaming politics or being in favor of certain laws or lack of them. We can start pointing fingers and saying it's one sides fault or the other's. It seems like social media allows people to be quite the screen warrior when promoting their opinions... But here is the downright problem of society that I see as an educator... Start parenting your own d--- kids and quit relying on schools, daycares, and the rest of society to do it for you."
Rebecca Friedrichs, who was a public school teacher for 28 years and is the founder of For Kids and Country, told Fox News Digital she believes schools need to teach values and morals.
"We cannot create enough laws to stop this school shooting problem, we instead need a rebirth of the value of human life that we used to have in this country," she said. "And, beyond human life … in America's schools, we used to teach morals."
Friedrichs blamed teachers unions for the change in schools, saying they pushed curriculum that is "divisive."
"They have removed the moral compass," she said. "Thanks to the teachers unions and their policies… now you can't really discipline kids who are out of control."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/texas-school-shooting-teachers-stop-gun-violence
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Protecting kids in school must be more than 'rhetoric,' real world solutions needed: Experts
Shootings carried out in places where there are fewer security measures, known as "soft targets," have rocked America at least three times over the last 12 days. The tragedies have sparked calls to beef up security in buildings such as schools and for politicians to stop with their rhetoric immediately after the tragedies.
"There's certainly been a push by some with the woke agenda to remove police officers from schools, and I couldn't think of an actually worse idea right now," Fraternal Order of Police National Vice President Joe Gamaldi told Fox News Digital Wednesday. "Schools are a particularly soft target. They're doing the best job that they can right now,"
A shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday left 19 children and two adults dead after suspected gunman Salvador Ramos opened fire inside. School leaders stretching from metro Atlanta, to Washington, D.C., to Central Florida have since increased police security and officers’ visibility at schools to protect children from potential threats.
Fox News Digital spoke to Robert McDonald, a former Secret Service agent and criminal justice expert at the University of New Haven, who said schools have come a long way in recent years with training and drills on how to protect against attacks. He added, however, that more safety measures need to be implemented and political rhetoric following such atrocities must end.
"We're very quick to listen to the politicians pontificate about what they feel needs to be done. Somebody needs to stand up and do something. They need to come across the aisle and get a positive direction moving here to stop this. The rhetoric needs to go away, the sound bites need to go away," McDonald told Fox News Digital Wednesday.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/texas-school-shooting-soft-targets-safety-rhetoric
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Racialism, decolonisation and the revolution in NZ education
New Zealand’s constitution is currently undergoing a major heart and lung transplant via co-governance arrangements between M?ori corporate tribes and the government.
It beggars belief that one of the modern world’s first democracies — founded in the fledgling 1852 Constitution Act — is descending into ethno-nationalism but the Labour Government is determined to embed racialised policies across a swathe of the nation’s laws and institutions, and not least in education.
Led by radical intellectuals of the corporate tribes and enabled by social justice warriors armed with an unassailable moral righteousness, New Zealand’s entire education system is rapidly being revolutionised.
Proposals in a recent government Green Paper for a Treaty of Waitangi-led science and research system include recognising m?tauranga M?ori (traditional knowledge) as equivalent to science.
The universities too are indigenising. According to the University of Auckland’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (M?ori), this means “finding ways where M?ori knowledge, ways of being, thinking and doing can thrive”.
Proposals to transform the university curriculum and teaching by inserting m?tauranga M?ori and kinship-based teaching and learning practices are now in the consultation phase.
The revolution does not stop there. The entire school sector is to be “decolonised”. The Ministry of Education’s ‘Te Hurihanganui A Blueprint for Transformative Systems Shift’ will include recognising “white privilege” and understanding racism in schools while the Ministry’s Curriculum Refresh will place ‘knowledge derived from Te Ao M?ori (the M?ori world)’ in the curriculum.
These initiatives, targeted at all levels of the education system will provide opportunities for an expansion of the cadre of decolonisers as ‘M?ori exercise authority and agency over their m?tauranga, tikanga (customs) and taonga (treasures)’.
Four strategies will ensure the revolution succeeds:
First, the opposition is being positioned as racist and reactionary, effectively silencing debate and creating self-censorship.
Second, government servants are required to accept the revisionist notion that the Treaty of Waitangi is a ‘partnership’ between two co-governing entities. Reprogramming services by government-paid consultants are on hand to encourage appropriate attitudes — signalled most obviously by insisting on using the correct language.
Third, the abandonment of universalism by the well-educated liberal-left who inhabit elevated positions in government and the caring professions will remove democracy’s very foundation. This is the principle of a shared universal humanity with the individual as the political category. It is the final point in the four decades convergence of postmodern relativism and identity politics.
The fourth strategy will be the clincher. It is the use of intellectual relativism to destroy the separation of science and culture that characterises the modern world.
Traditional cultural knowledge, including m?tauranga M?ori, employs supernatural explanations for natural and social phenomena. It also includes practical knowledge (proto-science or prescientific), acquired from observation, experience, and trial and error.
Such traditional knowledge has provided ways for humans to live successfully in their environment. Sometimes this has occurred in highly sophisticated ways, such as ocean navigation by the stars and currents, while efficacious medicines from plants may have helped to advance scientific or technological knowledge. Consequently, the role of traditional knowledge in humanity’s history justifies a place somewhere in the educational curriculum. But it is not science. It does not explain why such phenomena occur — just that they do.
Science provides naturalistic explanations for physical and social phenomena in the discovery of empirical, universal truths. It proceeds by conjecture and refutation. It requires doubt, challenge and critique, forever truth-seeking but with truth never fully settled.
Science’s naturalism and its self-criticism are anathema to the science-culture equivalence claim. A fundamental principle of science is that no knowledge is protected from criticism yet the Green Paper refers to protecting m?tauranga M?ori. Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science. Knowledge authorised by culture is ideology, not science.
Furthermore, m?tauranga M?ori’s inclusion in science throughout New Zealand’s education system will place research under cultural authority. Alarmingly, that authority is to be wielded by evangelical commissars who cannot be questioned.
The outrage encountered by those foolish or brave enough to mount a defence of science shows how important science-culture co-equivalence is to the overall decolonisation strategy.
Decolonisers will not, indeed cannot, tolerate its rejection. To do so would expose the fundamental premise of a racial ideology which claims that there is no universal human being and no universal science.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/racialism-decolonisation-and-the-revolution-in-nz-education/news-story/68985ecb1afedf68b054e0a11046f69f
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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25 May, 2022
Christians Hijacking Homeschooling?
An opinion column by Anthea Butler for MSNBC flat-out accuses white evangelical Christians of hijacking homeschooling. Her premise focuses on the shift to homeschooling that, she claims, occurred as a direct response to Brown v. Board of Education — the 1954 Supreme Court decision that integrated schools. In other words, evangelical homeschoolers are segregationists. But her main thesis isn’t the tired bromide about supposed conservative racism, but that the movement toward homeschooling thanks to the pandemic “is part of a larger project about dismantling the public education system in the United States.”
Let’s start with her inevitable first claim of racism. To give Butler the benefit of the doubt, some parents may have withdrawn their children from public schools after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. But the claim that homeschooling was a direct response to the Supreme Court’s ruling ignores the grand history of homeschooling in the United States that was prominent before Brown and has gained significant traction between 2020-2022.
Her next charge that homeschooling was hijacked by the religious Right also ignores history. Homeschooling has always had a religious bent. Parents who were seeking to educate their children at home wanted them to be literate and to be able to read the Bible. To quote John Adams, this country and its laws are made for a “moral and religious people.” Parents wanted to ensure that their children could read religious texts for themselves.
Though irrelevant to her core argument, Butler’s final plea that public schools are underfunded and dealing with staffing issues and violence is still poignant to point out. She neglects to mention why. Schools are “underfunded” partially because progressive-minded teachers unions, school administrators, and school boards squander funds on nonessentials like “anti-racist” teacher training. Schools are dealing with staffing issues because of bad leftist policies (like refusing to hire teachers who might be conservative) and plain teacher burnout. Violence is a horrible tragedy in public schools, though this is due to societal ills exacerbated by bad leftist policy — fatherless homes, welfare-trapped poor, gangs, and guidelines that cripple public schools’ ability to address the problem in an effective way.
Butler does admit that besides racism, parents are leaving for other reasons. She touches on the fact that parents of every race and creed have started retreating to homeschooling after seeing firsthand the indoctrination of their children. Parents entrusted the public school system to teach their children reading, writing, math, history, geography, science, and other important skills to prepare them for the future workforce. Schools have betrayed that trust and are foisting the critical race theory worldview and “Queer Marxism” on children in lieu of actually educating them. It creates an ignorant, easily manipulated population for down the road. Yet Butler feels that homeschooling creates an environment rife with child abuse and indoctrination. Oh, the irony…
Butler neglects another core reason that parents are fleeing public schools. Their children might be struggling with a learning disability that requires more personalized attention that can be addressed more effectively in a homeschool setting. These disabilities are not effectively addressed in public school classrooms that are notoriously overcrowded. The increase in learning disabilities amongst children is a major issue that has grown exponentially over the past decade. It’s not just that more children are being diagnosed early with disabilities such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia; it’s that there has been an actual growth in cases. Some of the reasons for this increase in learning disabilities include: diets, environmental issues, genetic issues, lack of social interaction, lack of play in early education, parental unwillingness to teach, growing up in a digital age, and cultural priorities that deemphasize academic excellence.
Butler’s article is ultimately just leftist propaganda that doesn’t actually address why parents are deciding to homeschool their children. That’s because the fruits of the poisonous tree would lead back to these same failed leftist education policies. More and more parents are unwilling to sacrifice their children on the altar of the leftist agenda. It is unsurprising that Butler is trying to salvage that sinking ship the only way she knows how: by painting the homeschooling community as racist white evangelical Christians who are going to impose their fundamentalist views on you and your children.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/88429-christians-hijacking-homeschooling-2022-05-18
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Florida’s Kids Will Learn Their History
“Economics is not the central problem of this century. … Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem — but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom he enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in man.”
So said Whittaker Chambers in Witness, a book that this year celebrates 70 years since its publication, and a book that renowned critic Hilton Kramer called “one of the few indispensable autobiographies ever written by an American.”
We have no idea whether Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ever read Witness, but a bill he signed into law last week makes clear that he understands not only the threat of communism, but the need to educate our children as to its man-centered atheistic wickedness. DeSantis called last Monday “a blockbuster day for freedom” as he signed a bill that will require public school students to observe “Victims of Communism Day” each year on November 7. As the Tampa Bay Times reports:
The new law, which went into effect immediately, describes the day as being geared toward “honoring the 100 million people who have fallen victim to communist regimes” across the world. The law also gives DeSantis authority to extend observance of the day beyond public schools, as it requires that Victims of Communism Day “be suitably observed by public exercise in the State Capitol and elsewhere as the governor may designate.”
The signing ceremony took place, fittingly, at Miami’s Freedom Tower, which marks the arrival of some 650,000 Cuban refugees in South Florida in the 1960s and ‘70s as they fled Fidel Castro’s brutal communist revolution.
Why teach kids about communism? Because, as historian David Satter wrote in The Wall Street Journal, these regimes have killed on an “industrial scale.”
“In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies,” Satter wrote. “This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics, and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.” And, he continues, when we count the victims of the various communist regimes linked to the USSR, “including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” the staggering death toll is about 100 million.
Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung’s denialist argument — that communism just hasn’t been done right! — is typical of those on the Left: “For any impressionable Florida kids that may be reading this, please note that there have never been any 'true’ communist countries, owing largely to violent intervention from the U.S. and other Western superpowers,” she wrote.
“We want to make sure that every year folks in Florida, but particularly our students, will learn about the evils of communism,” said DeSantis, “the dictators that have led communist regimes, and the hundreds of millions of individuals who suffered and continue to suffer under the weight of this discredited ideology.”
In doing so, the first-term governor, who’s up for reelection in November, drew yet another clear line of distinction between Democrat governance and Republican — the former known for its commie-sympathies and the latter known for its ardent anti-communism. A lot of young people “don’t really know that much” about the soul-crushing political ideology, DeSantis added. Indeed, as a poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found, one in five Millennials and one in three Gen Zers view communism favorably.
It can’t be stressed enough: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
And so, beginning in the 2023-2024 academic year, Florida high school students enrolled in U.S. government courses will get at least 45 minutes of instruction each November 7 describing how “decades of oppression and violence under communist regimes throughout the world” have caused incalculable “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence, and suppression of speech,” and how “the economic philosophies of Karl Marx … have proven incompatible with the ideals of liberty, prosperity and dignity of human life.”
“I think this tower,” said DeSantis, “is a reminder that freedom is not free, that you have to fight for your rights and that there are a lot of people out there that would love nothing more than to put you under some form of oppression.”
DeSantis may not be a witness in the same sense as Whittaker Chambers, who famously testified against his former fellow traveler, Alger Hiss, a communist spy. But DeSantis clearly understands the communist evils that take place yet today just 90 miles off our nation’s shore. Let’s hope other Republican governors do as well.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/88358-floridas-kids-will-learn-their-history-2022-05-16
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Before they can learn ‘antiracism,’ kids need to be literate — & too many aren’t
There’s an old joke about a chemist, a physicist and an economist stranded on a desert island with only a sealed can of food. The chemist and physicist each propose their own ideas about how to open the can. The punch line comes from the economist, who proffers: “First, assume a can opener.”
I’ve been brooding over this joke while watching “antiracism” teaching — some might call it Critical Race Theory (CRT) or social justice — take over the American education world with Omicron-like speed. Lesson plans, books, tips for in-class activities, discussion points, and curricula swamp the teachers’ corner of the Internet.
The proposals come from a metastasizing number of pedagogic entrepreneurs and activist groups, some savvy newcomers, some influential veterans like Black Lives Matter at School, Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), Teaching People’s History (the Zinn Education Project), the Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide (from the National Education Association), and, of course, the current star: the 1619 Project (the Pulitzer Center).
To me, all these ideas seem like the ruminations of desert-island economists. They start with an impossible premise: that the students of these recommended texts actually know how to read.
I am overstating, but not by much. A significant number of American students are reading fluently and with understanding and are well on their way to becoming literate adults. But they are a minority.
As of 2019, according to the National Association of Education Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, 35% of fourth-graders were reading at or above proficiency levels; that means, to spell it out, that a strong majority — 65%, to be exact — were less than proficient. In fact, 34% were reading, if you can call it that, below a basic level, barely able to decipher material suitable for kids their age.
Antiracist assumptions
Eighth-graders don’t do much better. Only 34% of them are proficient; 27% were below-basic readers. Worse, those eighth-grade numbers represent a decline from 2017 for 31 states.
As is always the case in our crazy-quilt, multiracial, multicultural country, the picture varies, depending on which kids you’re looking at. If you categorize by states, the lowest scores can be found in Alabama and New Mexico, with just 21% of eighth-graders reading proficiently. The best thing to say about these results is that they make the highest-scoring state — Massachusetts, with 47% of students proficient — look like a success story rather than the mediocrity it is.
The findings that should really push antiracist educators to rethink their pedagogical assumptions are those for the nation’s black schoolchildren. Nationwide, 52% of black children read below basic in fourth grade. (Hispanics, at 45%, and Native Americans, at 50%, do almost as badly, but I’ll concentrate here on black students, since antiracism clearly centers on the plight of African Americans.)
Black students suffer
The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cities are so low that they flirt with zero. In Baltimore, where 80% of the student body is black, 61% of these students are below basic; only 9% of fourth-graders and 10% of eighth-graders are reading proficiently. (The few white fourth-graders attending Charm City’s public schools score 36 points higher than their black classmates.)
Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourth-grade reading scores; only 5% of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)
In April 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of former students suing Detroit schools for not providing an adequate education. The suit cited poor facilities and inadequate textbooks, but below-basic literacy skills were the primary academic complaint. One of the plaintiffs was a former Detroit public school student who went on to community college and ended up on academic probation, in need of a reading tutor.
His story is typical enough as to be barely worth mentioning — except for the fact that he graduated at the top of his public high school class. And as if this isn’t bad enough, the numbers appear likely to get worse, with the impact of COVID-19 disruptions.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/24/before-they-can-learn-antiracism-kids-need-to-be-literate-too-many-arent/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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24 May, 2022
Michigan school suspends teacher for worksheet comparing Obama to monkeys
A prestigious Detroit-area school that passed an “anti-racism resolution” in 2021 suspended one of its teachers after she passed out a worksheet to students comparing former President Barack Obama to monkeys.
The paperwork, which was reportedly given to approximately 30 students at The Roeper School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, asked students to identify primates from a gallery of photos labeled apes, monkeys and lemurs. Included in the gallery was a picture of the former president.
After news of the worksheet circulated, the school canceled classes on Thursday because of alleged threats. They also offered counseling and said in a statement: “On behalf of Roeper School’s leadership, we want to acknowledge the disturbing racial offense contained in an assignment with an upper school class last week.”
“The choice to use this piece of curriculum was completely inconsistent with our School’s philosophy and mission and we sincerely apologize for its use and the harm it has caused,” the school continued.
“While the teacher has taken responsibility and admits the mistake of not properly vetting the resource, we know that is not enough and she has been placed on administrative leave until further notice.”
Carolyn Lett, who serves as the director of diversity at the $30,000-per-year school, told local news outlet WJBK-TV that the worksheet made her feel “disgusted” and that “she couldn’t believe it.”
“When I first saw it, I’m trying to make sense of it myself,” she said.
Lett said the teacher claimed she was “horrified” by the worksheet and did not notice Obama’s portrait among the animals.
“It is made all the more challenging for us because it is the antithesis of who we are as a school,” said Clay Thomas, chair of Roeper Board of Trustees, according to local Fox 2.
In May 2021, the school board of trustees adopted an anti-racism resolution that claimed “ongoing social justice issues across our country, including the killings of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), have had a profound impact on our past and present students, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees, and families at The Roeper School.”
One of the resolutions adopted by the board at the time is “that we believe Black lives matter,” and that “we condemn all forms of bullying, microaggressions, hate speech, and violence.”
The Roeper School is the oldest school for gifted kids in the United States, according to its website, and prides itself on educating students from diverse ethnicities, races and socio-economic backgrounds. It was founded by George and Annemarie Roeper, who moved to Michigan in 1941 as religious refugees from Nazi Germany.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/michigan-school-suspends-teacher-for-worksheet-comparing-obama-to-monkeys/
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The NY Regents is on a slow march to having zero graduation standards
Once again, the state Board of Regents is using the pandemic as an excuse for lowering high-school graduation requirements: letting students more easily appeal failing scores on Regents exams through the end of this school year.
Seniors must score a 65 or higher to pass Regents tests in at least five subject areas to earn a high school diploma. Now kids with failing scores of at least 50 can appeal.
This follows one year when the exams were canceled and the requirement waived entirely and a second with greatly eased requirements.
And some regents want the exit exams junked forever, arguing that the tests disproportionately “harm” minority and disadvantaged students — meaning, they expose the fact that they haven’t gotten a quality education.
Heck, one principal complained to Chalkbeat: “Even though the exams will be easier to pass, students still will face pressure to score well above a 50.” Worse, he wasn’t “sure what the state is hoping to accomplish by having the Regents exams at all.” Um, ensuring that a New York high-school diploma isn’t worthless?
The people in charge of education in the Empire State, and all too many throughout the system, are doing their best to keep everyone in the dark about their failures. Is it any wonder that families and students are leaving the public school system in droves?
https://nypost.com/2022/05/22/ny-regents-on-a-slow-march-to-zero-graduation-standards/
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Seven books that show NYC is pushing transgenderism, LGBTQ+ curriculum to kids as young as kindergarten
New York City has a series of books in its Mosaic Independent Reading Collection that focuses on teaching children as young as first grade and Kindergarten about LGBTQ+ and other left-wing issues, Fox News Digital has learned.
The reading lists, which include titles on Greta Thunberg and Elizabeth Warren, were created by the NYC Department of Education Library services, according to the TeachingBooks website. The page can only be accessed internally through the DOE's official login for students and teachers.
Brooklyn parent leader, Vito Labella, told Fox News Digital that he frequently gets calls from concerned parents who are worried about transgender and critical race theory-derived curricula being taught to their young children. Fox News Digital reached out to the DOE about the educational materials but did not receive a response.
"They are terrified to speak up," said Labella, who is also running for New York State Senate with a top issue of restoring parents' rights in education.
Officials announced the Mosaic curriculum $200-million overhaul in July 2021; it was intended to diversify the curriculum and standardize English and math instruction, according to the New York Post. "[Mosaic] will simplify and clarify the work of our educators and better represent our kids," former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/top-7-radical-left-books-new-york-city-universak-mosaic-curriculum
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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23 May, 2022
‘They’ve told him that as a black man the world is against him’: Single mom of biracial son, 13, sues his school over CRT because ‘everything that doesn't go his way is racist - including chores'
A single mother of a biracial son is suing his school over its 'anti-racism' CRT-style program, saying he now sees things that don't go his way as racism.
Melissa Riley, from Charlottesville in Virginia, said that her 13-year-old boy never saw himself as different to other students until the Albemarle School District introduced an 'anti-racism' program to his middle school last spring.
Speaking to Fox News, she said it was then that he began thinking in terms of race.
'We didn't have issues before. He is in eighth grade,' Riley told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Monday evening. 'He's seeing himself just as a Black man. He's seeing things that don't go his way as racism. And he is finding safety in numbers now.'
Riley said that her teenage son started to accuse her and others of racism as a way to get out of doing chores and other responsibilities. In one example, she said he once accused her of being racist when she asked him to clean the house.
'They have totally changed his perspective. They have put him in a box,' she said of the curriculum at Henley Middle School in Crozet, Virginia.
She told the news channel that her son is using racism 'as an excuse because they have told him that that's how people see him, as a Black man, that the world is against and [he] sees it as a negative now.'
When she confronted the school over the issue, Riley said the school told her that her son could be a 'Black spokesman for the Black community' in the school.
The mother said when she pushed back, telling school officials she did not feel that would be appropriate for her son, she was told 'he and other children of color could go to a safe place during these conversations.'
This, she argued, would be 'segregation'.
In July 2021, it was reported by the Crozet Gazette that Henley Middle School's anti-racism curriculum was dividing opinions among teachers and parents.
The local news outlet reported that the curriculum was called 'Courageous Conversations About Race' [CCAR], and was launched over several weeks in May and June last year - covering four units on identity, community, bias, discrimination, and social justice. These all had an emphasis on anti-racism.
The Crozet gazette said the introduction of the curriculum had divided opinion, with some parents saying CCAR bore similarities to the divisive Critical Race Theory (CRT) - that teaches the idea that racism is fundamentally embedded in American political and social institutions.
Parents across the country have attended school board meetings in their droves to protest against the introduction CRT in their children's schools, arguing that such teaching only serves to stoke divisions further.
According to the New York Post, Riley and her son are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in December by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) against the Albemarle County School Board over its program.
While the Albemarle County School Board does not call the program 'CRT' (instead using CCAR), CRT still underpins and informs anti-racism training and teaching programs in schools.
The ADF is a nonprofit conservative legal firm, and is arguing that the district's anti-racism policy violates Virginia's constitution and parental rights.
The New York Post reported that the ADF's lawsuit was dismissed last month by a circuit court judge, who did not object to the district's policy.
Albemarle Circuit Judge Claude Worrell II declared there was 'nothing inherently evil or wrong' about the anti-racism policy.
Lawyers for the ADF have said they would appeal the ruling, with Ryan Bangert, senior counsel with the ADF, saying they were disappointed with the result.
Bangert, who is also Riley's lawyer, told Fox News that the school board was 'fighting back'. He said: 'They simply think it's fine. They think it's okay. But it's not okay. It's never okay.
'It's never right for a school to teach kids that they are determined by their race. It's never okay for a school to tell kids that bigotry should be fought with bigotry and racism should be fought by doubling down on racism. Those things are not okay,' Banger continued. 'They're a violation of students' civil rights.'
Critical Race Theory in school curriculums has become a point of controversy across the nation, as parents, politicians, students and educators debate the societal theory's place in the classroom.
Virginia in particular has become a battleground over the issue of CRT being taught in schools, with parents saying they are being disenfranchised by schools implementing such programs without their consent.
Conservatives have taken to using the phrase as a way to describe lessons on racism and 'equity' across all grade levels - and have criticized the theory for claiming that the U.S. is built on racial animus, with skin color determining the social, economic and political differences between people.
Critics say it is divisive and paints everyone as a victim or oppressor, while advocates say its teaching is necessary to underline how deeply racism pervades society.
Numerous bills have been passed by states banning the teaching of CRT in schools.
Joe Biden's new 'disinformation czar,' Nina Jankowicz, dismissed concerns about Critical Race Theory in schools as 'disinformation for profit' in May - despite parents across the country being worried about the teaching of the philosophy in their children's classrooms.
'I live in Virginia, and in Loudoun County that's one of the areas where people have really honed in on this topic,' she said.
'But it's no different than any of the other hot-button issues that have allowed disinformation to flourish,' Jankowicz said during a talk at the City Club of Cleveland in 2021, 'It's weaponizing people's emotion.'
Jankowicz was referring to controversy in Loudon County, Virginia, where parents and school administrators have clashed over the place of CRT in county's curriculums.
The Loudoun School Board has been mired in controversy as Parents have voiced their frustration with the state's woke school board, saying they did not want their children to be taught CRT.
Multiple school board meetings made headlines after parents were filmed clashing with staff over the decision to teach it - and the board's approval of a $6 million 'equity-training' program last year, as well as the approval of a study into whether it would be appropriate to give reparations to black people
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10824105/Single-mom-biracial-son-13-sues-school-CRT-curriculum.html
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Honoring Veterans with Educational Freedom
Americans want to honor the veterans and service members who sacrifice so much to defend our freedom. That’s why we have holidays like Memorial Day. Yet members of our military deserve more than speeches and parades. They deserve parental choice in education.
“[W]hile our service members fight for our freedoms abroad, too many military families are denied education freedom at home,” according to former deputy U.S. Secretary of Education Mitchell Zais. And he should know: Zais served in the U.S. Army for 31 years and retired as a brigadier general.
The lack of parental choice in education hits military families especially hard because they can’t just pick up and move if their neighborhood public schools aren’t meeting their children’s needs. Not only does a lack of educational options hurt military families, it has significant negative implications for national security.
More than one-third of military families say dissatisfaction with their children’s education is “a significant factor” affecting their decision to continue serving. According to Zais, the commanding general of one of the Army’s largest training installations reports having difficulty recruiting drill sergeants because of the poor quality of local schools. In fact, 40 percent of respondents recently told the Military Times that they “have either declined or would decline a career-advancing job at a different installation to remain at their current military facility because of high performing schools.”
Not surprisingly a majority of military families support various types of parental choice, according to an EdChoice survey of military families. It found that nearly three out of four military families favor education savings accounts (ESAs), while two out of three support voucher scholarships and public charter schools.
Today, more than 600,000 students are attending the private schools of their parents’ choice through ESAs, publicly-financed voucher scholarship programs, and privately-financed tax-credit scholarship programs in 33 states, including Washington, D.C., plus Puerto Rico.
Importantly, a growing number of those programs have expanded their eligibility criteria to include children from military families or those whose parents were killed while serving their country, including seven programs in Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
The concept behind ESAs is simple: when a student withdraws from public school, a portion of the associated funding that would have gone to their district or charter school to educate them is deposited into that child’s ESA instead. Under most existing state-level programs, parents are issued a type of dedicated-use debit card to purchase pre-approved educational products and services. Best of all, ESAs empower parents to customize their children’s learning no matter where they live.
States should continue enacting and expanding parental choice programs, but there are policies Congress should pursue that wouldn’t expand the federal footprint into education, especially ESAs.
One option is simply allowing veterans to direct their earned education benefits to their school-age children in the form of ESAs, rather than limiting those funds to college tuition. Another policy recommended by The Heritage Foundation would distribute Impact Aid to military families directly in the form of ESAs, which parents could use to pay for the education they think is best for their children.
Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana has introduced legislation that would direct the U.S. Secretary of Education to establish ESAs on behalf of interested military families, who could use those funds to pay for eligible educational expenses for their children such as private school tuition and online programs, private tutoring, public school classes and extracurricular activities, textbooks, curricula, and contributions to college savings accounts.
Research shows that parents are using their children’s state-funded ESAs to pay for a variety of educational services and private schools. Moreover, ESA funds are not only sufficient to cover annual educational expenses, including special education therapies, parents have enough left over to save for their children’s future education expenses.
Research has also consistently shown that parents who can choose their children’s schools are more satisfied than parents who cannot. ESA programs in particular have extremely high parental satisfaction levels, approaching—even far exceeding—90 percent. In addition, nearly 80 percent of current military parents favor ESAs.
U.S. Department of Defense data suggest that approximately 40% of active-duty military children ages six to 18 live in states that ban or cap the number of public charter schools. In fact, more than one-third of them live in states with such poor charter laws, these schools offer only limited options.
What’s more, nearly 80% of active-duty military children live in states where public school officials are not required to accept out-of-district open-enrollment transfer students, leaving many of them trapped in schools that do not work for them.
Calling this situation “a travesty,” Rep. Banks rightly notes that “Congress can alleviate this critical problem by supporting education savings accounts for military families.” After all, Americans who sacrifice so much for their country should not have to sacrifice when it comes to providing a quality education for their children.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14169&omhide=true&trk=title
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Left-Wingers at Lecterns: Most College Graduation Speakers Are Liberals, Survey Finds
Don’t plan on hearing from a conservative speaker at your college commencement this spring.
This year, just three of the top 100 colleges ranked by U.S. News and World Report are hosting conservative commencement speakers, while 53 are hosting left-of-center lecturers, according to the Young America’s Foundation 2022 Commencement Speaker Survey.
The remaining colleges and universities are not tallied in the foundation’s study if they are hosting speakers without apparent political affiliations, hosting multiple speakers, opted for university personnel to give the address, or hadn’t announced their commencement speakers as of the conclusion of the survey.
The trend of political liberals dominating the list of graduation speakers has been ongoing for the past 30 years, according to the foundation.
For the class of 2022, the speeches are being given by the likes of comedian Ken Jeong and former NBA basketball star Dwyane Wade, with speeches focusing on topics such as anti-racism and social justice.
Harvard University is hosting New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who has kept the Pacific island nation locked down throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Some highly rated schools selected woke celebrities, such as Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Taylor Swift (New York University) and actor Kal Penn (University of California at Irvine), who served in the Obama administration.
“Despite his sinking poll numbers and rising inflation, President Joe Biden himself is scheduled to speak at University of Delaware’s commencement—so long as he can remember to show up on time,” the Young America’s Foundation report says. Biden represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for 36 years.
The foundation says the only three conservatives this year at commencement lecterns will be Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. However, other leading conservatives, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem were not expected to speak at any commencements this year, according to the foundation’s survey.
“Even as Americans are beginning to wake up and wholly reject the left’s disastrous economic policies and culture wars, America’s universities are working overtime to rehab the left’s failing image,” it concluded. “It’s truly sad that up until their very last day of school, students are being indoctrinated by speakers with a clear ideological agenda—people who have no intent on giving an actual inspiring, powerful send-off to our future leaders.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/18/left-wingers-at-lecterns-most-college-graduation-speakers-are-liberals-survey-finds/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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22 May, 2022
School Board Member to Host ‘Queer Youth’ Event at Sex Shop for ‘All Ages’
A Washington state school board member is set to host a “Queer Youth Open Mic Night” at a sex store for children aged “0-18” on June 1.
Jenn Mason, who sits on the board of directors of Bellingham Public Schools, owns the sex shop WinkWink Boutique, according to the store’s website, which is set to host the event. The Queer Youth Open Mic Night Facebook page invites “queer youth” of all ages to share poetry, music, or a story, according to the event’s Facebook page.
“WinkWink offers a space for people—including queer folks—to ask questions and learn about sexuality in an accepting, safe, and shame-free environment. We receive extensive sexual health training and are a knowledgeable, inclusive community resource—something severely lacking around sexuality in our culture,” Mason told KTTH radio host Jason Rantz on Tuesday.
Mason added that the children would be “physically separated” from the store’s adult products.
The WinkWink Boutique describes itself as “woman-owned, inclusive not creepy,” and for “all ages” on its website. Alongside a variety of sex toys, the WinkWink Boutique offers “private sex coaching” with Mason, who states that she is a “certified sex coach and educator” on the site.
Mason was elected to the Bellingham Public School Board in November 2017, according to the district’s website. Mason has worked as a community educator and trauma counselor in schools across Whatcom County, Washington, the website states.
The WinkWink Boutique, Mason, and Bellingham Public Schools did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/19/school-board-director-to-host-queer-youth-event-at-sex-shop-for-all-ages
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Why Google Doesn’t Hire Top Graduates
According to Laszlo Bock, a former Google executive, top students from the best schools often lack the intellectual humility that comes with failure.
As a result, they develop a highly egocentric worldview.
“If something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources,” Bock explained.
This sort of thinking, of course, is highly incompatible with Google’s constant-learning, soft-skill dominated value system. But it’s not the only reason why Google doesn’t really care about your grades.
A while ago, Google ran a study that found there was no correlation between employee performance and their school GPA.
Apparently, Google really took that study to heart. While it used to be proud of trophy Harvard and MIT graduates, it since loosened its hiring policy. In 2018, they even stopped requiring a degree altogether.
“Good grades certainly don’t hurt,” Bock added. “[But] for every job, though, the №1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly.”
So far, so good. In the interview, Laszlo Bock named several buzzword-y attributes that make a good Googler. Leadership skills, soft skills, general cognitive abilities, rigorous analytical skills. None of these are necessarily tied to your GPA. Everything seemed to make sense.
Until Bock said something very disturbing.
Apparently, it’s not all degrees Google considers worthless. Just the humanities ones.
One of the applicants Bock personally worked with was considering switching from a computer science degree to an economics one. According to Bock, this move showed the student’s lack of resilience.
“I told that student they are much better off being a B student in computer science than an A+ student in English because it signals a rigor in your thinking and a more challenging course load.”
That’s one funny conversion chart. But it seems to be reflective of how Google think about college degrees.
Bock made a comment on another case, where a student switched from electrical engineering to psychology.
“I think this student was making a mistake,” said Bock. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force.”
This sort of thinking is by no means new. Ever since the industrial revolution, studying art and humanities has been increasingly portrayed as second-tier.
This has been especially obvious in the last 30 years, where degrees with a focus on computer science and engineering have been ones that offered a clear roadmap into a career.
But the entire lineup between STEM degrees and the IT industry is more accidental than it is designed. University degrees were never meant to train the labour force — they were meant to give broad, conceptual knowledge. (Exactly what Google claims it’s looking for.)
Universities were always supposed to be a place where you come to grow as a person, instead of training to be a part of the workforce. It used to be a place where intellectuals come together to do research, discuss ideas, and pass on their knowledge to future generations.
Humanities are an absolutely inseparable part of that. Think programming is hard? Try reading Dostoyevsky.
I was absolutely infuriated when Naval Ravikant, a Silicon Valley investor, called humanities “not a real science” on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
He said that social sciences essentially rode the wave of credibility that “real sciences” like math and physics have built. Humanities, in his view, are little more but a political puppet show.
As someone who writes both articles and apps, this sort of radical one-sidedness always sounds borderline dangerous to me. A book is equal parts engineering and art. The iPhone is equal parts engineering and art. You cannot separate one from the other and expect something good to happen.
Unfortunately, at the moment Silicon Valley seems to be determinedly biased towards STEM fields, even if your grade isn’t A+. So, yes, go ahead and send that resume. Unless, of course, you’re an English major.
https://alan-12169.medium.com/the-disturbing-reason-why-google-doesnt-hire-top-graduates-9715cac0fd24
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NYC's Black Mayor Bucks Progressives on the Racial Chessboard of 'Gifted' Education
Mayor Eric Adams’ plan to save accelerated education in New York City from progressive critics begins with students like Cassy Thime’s daughter: a black second-grader who would thrive in a gifted classroom that today includes few kids of color.
“She’s a top student and a gifted program will give her a more rigorous education and push her to excel,” said Thime, who has a doctorate in education and lives in Queens. “Now she has classmates who can’t even read.”
Adams, who took office in January, is diving headfirst into a controversy over academically selective schools that’s dividing communities from San Francisco to Fairfax County, Va.
New York’s second black mayor rejects the criticism that accelerated learning is racist and must be dismantled because of the low number of students of color who qualify. He believes they should strive for an elite education, too. To help them, Adams and his new schools chancellor, David Banks, are staking a middle ground that embraces both competitive academics and diversity. If this longshot strategy works, New York could influence districts across the country.
As Banks sees it, the problem with selective schools boils down to scarcity – there are too few seats for advanced students in elementary, middle, and high schools for all who merit one. So the solution is pretty obvious: Create more elite schools and programs.
New York is starting with the addition of 1,100 seats to the gifted and talented (G&T) program for elementary students this fall. Identifying more advanced black and Latino students from the get-go means they will be bettered prepared to qualify for New York’s elite middle and high schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech – schools that are under constant attack from progressives for admitting just a handful of blacks and Latinos.
To ensure that blacks and Latinos fill more of the seats in the expanding G&T program, Adams also has to change the admissions process. Citywide testing, in which all students across New York compete against each other for admission, has been an obstacle. Minority students (not including Asians) took only 16% of the gifted seats prior to the pandemic while making up about 63% of all elementary students, with whites and Asians occupying about 75% of the gifted slots, according to city data.
For this reason, Banks is dropping the citywide written test, which was taken mostly by white and Asian students whose parents signed them up. Now all preschool students will be evaluated by teachers for admission, and the top performing second-graders in each elementary school will also be invited to apply. This approach, employing what academics call “local norms,” means that students will compete against others in similar socioeconomic groups, reducing any academic advantage that growing up in wealthier school districts may provide.
The likely upshot is that a higher percentage of blacks and Latinos and a lower percentage of whites and Asians will be admitted into the gifted program, a racial rebalancing that has set off a backlash in other school districts. Asian parents in Fairfax County, Virginia, sued over a racial rebalancing at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and lost at the Supreme Court in April.
But G&T advocates in New York are open to the rebalancing, as long as the pie is expanding for everyone and the admissions process is standardized and transparent. Chien Kwok of the Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education, an advocacy group of mainly Asian Americans, hailed Adams’ plan for embracing the concept that gifted kids in all communities are entitled to a rigorous education.
“In the past we were leaving gifted children behind,” Kwok said. “Now the program is expanding, it’s no longer a zero-sum game, so I’m supportive.”
A Win for High Academic Standards
Banks is also promising to bring a similar expansion to the city’s selective middle and high schools in the future. If that happens, it would benefit tens of thousands of students in the nation’s largest school system and send a message nationwide that high academic standards and racial equity don’t have to be at loggerheads.
“A lot of people are going to watch carefully to see how well this works,” said Jonathan Plucker, a professor at the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. “And I'm very confident that it will eventually evolve into something that's going to be a huge plus for the country and a big win for excellence in education.”
That may be a bullish view considering the obstacles ahead. Banks has been scathing in his criticism of the Department of Education he now leads, calling it a broken, top-heavy bureaucracy that has struggled to make progress over the years in its most basic tasks, such as teaching students to read at grade level.
To improve the gifted program, teachers – most of whom are not certified to teach gifted students – need to be trained. Nor does the city have anything like a well-designed and up-to-date curriculum to challenge gifted students. Currently, gifted instruction varies greatly from school to school, and often doesn’t go much beyond the general education curriculum mandated by the state.
The chancellor will also have to contend with a dozen advocacy groups and parents in several of New York’s 32 districts that are ideologically opposed to competitive academic programs that separate students by abilities. These groups, such as New York Appleseed, have lobbied for years to abolish accelerated schools and place students of wide-ranging abilities – as much as six grade levels apart – in the same general education classroom to reduce racial segregation. The advanced students will help those who are academically behind, the theory goes, and everyone wins.
Progressives came close to achieving their goal, called Brilliant NYC, at the end of Bill de Blasio’s run as mayor last year. They are “appalled” that Adams rejected it in favor of a G&T redesign that they consider inherently elitist and without value to any students.
“The gifted and talented program is very contentious and this new administration is going backwards by expanding it,” said Allison Roda, a professor of education at Molloy College who helped develop Brilliant NYC. “Gifted and talented has always been used as a tool to segregate students and avoid integration.”
Flight From NYC Schools
The mayor’s buildout of gifted education, announced in April, was one of his first major policy decisions, reflecting an urgency to reverse the flight of wealthier families from the school system.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/05/19/genius_move_nycs_black_mayor_bucks_progressives_on_the_racial_chessboard_of_gifted_education_832652.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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20 May, 2022
A poisonous pledge
I grew up in North Carolina in the 1950s where I regularly faced one of the most egregious symbols of segregation—two water fountains, side-by-side, labeled “White” and “Colored.” I freely drank from the same water jug that Black farmworkers did in fields at my home, an all-White Presbyterian orphanage with 225 disadvantaged children ages two to eighteen (hardly a recognized seedbed for “White privilege”), but I couldn’t share a water fountain with the same workers at the Belk department store in downtown Statesville, three miles away. I played with the Black workers’ kids during summers but couldn’t ride the same bus with them to the same school. The disparities of racial treatment were not lost on my pre-woke generation.
Many others and I saluted and internalized the dream of protesters of the 1960s, that Blacks and Whites could together outgrow the shame of prevalent stark contrasts in racial treatment, and I welcomed the then imagined future in which people would no longer be judged by skin color.
Since the Reverend King majestically proclaimed his Dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, I’ve done my darnedest to work with people based on the “content of their character” (and scholarship). I understand that skin color is hard to ignore, but I’ve taken King’s admonition seriously, as have hordes of others, especially in universities. By the standards of the 1950s, I have lived through substantial (if not enormous) racial progress—I say with gratitude and relief.
On-Campus “Woke Racism”
Yet, my dream of shared color blindness is suffering because of my university’s relentless insistence on giving skin color— “blackness” or “anti-blackness”—priority in people’s on-campus interactions. Administrators, from the chancellor on down, regularly make sweeping pronouncements, suggesting that those in a non-minority—translated, “Whites”—should be suspected of “systemic racism,” whether they are “conscious” or “unconscious” of their affliction. It’s as if those side-by-side “water fountains” have been reintroduced in disguise, cloaked in the rhetoric of “inclusive excellence.”
The irony in such claims is that (non-Hispanic) Whites on campus are a distinct minority, at 15 percent of the 36,000-student body (and 36.6 percent of California’s total population). Granted, Blacks represent a tiny minority of on-campus students, 2.1 percent (but also only 5.8 percent of California’s population, with only 13 percent of Blacks seeking a college education). Nevertheless, administrators seem convinced that Blacks’ small share can be attributed, to a non-trivial extent, to pervasive on-campus anti-Black racism, with rare reference to other explanations, including admission standards and Blacks wanting to attend other universities with more Blacks and, maybe, fewer Asians (the dominant on-campus ethnic group).
Campus “inclusive excellence” proponents seem unaware that they have been countering one form of racism with another—dubbed “woke racism” by Columbia University linguist John McWhorter—and are thus aggravating on-campus divisions. They seem equally oblivious to the prospects of sowing seeds of exclusion (and resentment) under their mantra. They also appear unconcerned that some on-campus Blacks have tired of being denied, through promotions of special considerations for them, full credit for thriving on their own at a demanding major research university.
The “Take the Pledge” Campaign
In explaining on-campus “woke racism,” I offer exhibit 1, the university’s step-too-far, a campaign to persuade, or intimidate, all in the university to “Take the Pledge.” You might think that the pledge is dedicated to some academic honor code or a fund-raiser. No. The campaign is devoted to making skin color key to developing a campus culture of “inclusive excellence,” where “Black people can thrive at UCI,” a goal no one contests (if applied equally to all others). To do that, however, all in the university have been implored repeatedly to pledge to:
Acknowledge the existence of anti-Black racism
Understand your relationship to anti-Black and micro- and macro-aggressions
Recognize uncredited labor that Black people expend to manage the effects of unconscious and conscious acts of bias, prejudice and bigotry
Confront anti-Blackness to build a thriving culture for Black people
The pledge effectively seeks signees to confess to their own non-deniable original sin of inculcated systemic racism. It concludes, “I recognize that a whole university response is required to build a culture where Black people thrive at UCI and beyond.” Nice words, I grant.
The message is clear: Set aside a transparent fact of campus life, that a large percentage of all students in the country’s most highly diverse student body are first-generation college students, many are from humble backgrounds (a third are Pell Grant recipients), some are from oppressive foreign regimes—and all are no less deserving of a culture free of blanket claims of on-campus racism by non-Blacks and Blacks alike.
What is remarkable for an elite public research university that has long prided itself on the extent of its data-driven scientific studies is that the “Take the Pledge” campaign has been vigorously pursued without a scintilla of documentation, not even a single recorded data point of an anti-Black racial incident on campus. No one has even considered the extent to which anti-Black incidents are greater or lower than anti-Asian incidents by non-Blacks or Blacks.
Not that such incidents haven’t occurred. The point is that the campaign promoters have not done their homework. Instead, they have followed the path of the racists they have criticized: They have caved to their prejudices, a key one being that because (as promoters have professed on video) racism was self-evident in Charlottesville’s violent protests and the George Floyd murder, all members (or some unknown subset) of my university community must harbor a racial animus toward Blacks, which is to say, they are guilty by racial identity or just administrative fiat. By the breadth of their racial claims, promoters do more to signal their own self-proclaimed racial virtue than they do to solve (or just avoid aggravating) what they present as a vaguely defined social-justice problem.
On-Campus Racial Reeducation Programs
At the beginning of the “Take the Pledge” campaign, pledgers were not pressed to reveal their identities. Now, signers are asked to provide their names, email addresses, and UC-Irvine affiliation (which means promoters can tabulate and track those who have and have not signed the pledge, which should be worrisome). They are also asked to give permission to use their names and testimonials in future “marketing materials.” And they have begun to promote the signees’ testimonials, which, to date, represent a tiny fraction of those considered in the university community (students, faculty, staff, alumni, extended supporters, and who knows?). No one should be surprised if signing becomes mandatory. Indeed, count on it. The proponents are missionaries.
Within a day of the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Wisconsin handing down its not-guilty verdict, the chief inclusive-excellence officer on campus cited the verdict as yet another reason for all on campus to take the Pledge, officially declaring for the university, “[T]the verdict conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies’ matter.” The officer’s message is even more chilling, given how such an official university pronouncement could easily stoke on-campus racial divisions, as it likely has.
Administrators are apparently concerned that many pledgers will need corrective reeducation and have provided a fourteen-week course, the UCI Inclusive Excellence Certificate Program, which covers on-campus “racial bias,” “White supremacy,” “mechanisms for devaluing Black people,” and rationales for the Pledge. Pledge proponents seem intent on having non-Blacks seek absolution by confessing to their racial sins and then attending reeducation camps (tactics reminiscent of those commonly employed by oppressive regimes and groups the world over, not in scholarly communities).
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Wouldn’t a pledge to uphold King’s sentiments—or the Golden Rule—more effectively promote “inclusive excellence”? The loss in this well-intended but misguided take-the-pledge campaign is an unrecognized affront to King’s dream that one day people will be judged by the “content of their character,” not their skin color. That day has, sadly, been postponed at my university.
https://blog.independent.org/2022/05/11/a-misguided-take-the-pledge-campaign/?omhide=true
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Using ‘Wrong’ Pronouns Could Lead to Suspensions in Virginia Public Schools
Living as a Christian could get a student suspended from public school in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Earlier this month, the school board conducted an annual review of its Regulation 2601, proposing edits to a 70-page-long document on “Student Rights and Responsibilities,” and parents noticed something shocking.
According to a short provision buried deep in the document, students could face suspension for up to five days, and possibly further punishment, for referring to a fellow student according to their biological, God-given sex.
“Using slurs based upon the actual or perceived gender identity (which includes, but is not limited to, malicious deadnaming or malicious misgendering),” reads the offending provision, which appears on Page 21, under the “SBAR Code” “RB9h,” three pages into an extensive table aligning all possible offenses and punishments.
The corresponding “Level 4” violation (nowhere defined) merits the punishment “circled R” (“®”), defined on Page 19, “allows for a suspension up to 5 days [if frequency and intensity are present]. Also allows for a referral to the Division Superintendent … ” (text in brackets is a proposed addition).
Is it just me, or is the bureaucratic jargon intentionally designed to confuse and discourage parents?
Glossing over its granting sexual orientation and gender identity protections parity with innate categories, this particular provision has three glaring problems.
The first is the use of the words “deadnaming” and “misgendering.” These words carry no meaning to a normal, sane person who hasn’t imbibed the transgender Kool-Aid. They describe using someone’s given name and biological pronouns, respectively, when that person identifies with a name and pronouns of the opposite sex. They’re mostly used as shorthand smears to apply sinister connotations to innocent behavior.
Secondly, the provision describes using someone’s accurate name or pronouns as “slurs,” in a list with prohibitions of “slurs” based on someone’s race, religion, or disability. This is totally backward. Not long ago, it was insulting to call a man “effeminate,” or to call a woman “mannish.” Now, we’re told, it insults certain people to not call them the opposite sex of what they truly are. “He looks like a boy in a dress” should only be an insult if it is not true.
Thirdly, Fairfax County wrongly assumes malicious intent in using the “wrong” name or pronoun. It presumes that transgender affirmation is the only moral option. It rules out the possibility that someone could have good motives for behaving otherwise, such as a commitment to absolute truth, concern over someone’s eternal soul, or seeking their present happiness (as distinct from accommodating their present feelings).
In other words, it assumes Christians are acting maliciously. After all, every American so far who has gotten in trouble for using the wrong pronouns has been a Christian deeply committed to the Bible’s teaching. In fact, the terms of this provision target Christians so precisely it seems as if it were intentionally designed with them in mind.
But not to worry, the students’ new overlords, Fairfax County teachers, are merciful—or at least patient. Based on their guidelines, they likely won’t suspend a student for a first offense. But they will correct them and expect it not to happen again.
“Any student who commits multiple offenses … may … face more stringent disciplinary action as a result,” they warn. They aren’t out to get your child at first, so long as they get them in the end.
If they can’t persuade a student to reject biblical truth about human sexuality, that student had better beware. They could face graver disciplinary action, like suspension. If a suspension doesn’t work, they can refer the student to the division superintendent, who “will consider all possible sanctions in the same hearing (to include short-term suspension, long-term suspension, reassignment, and/or expulsion).” And even afterward, the student “may be subject to ongoing consequences, even after the student returns,” including “probationary conditions” and “restitution.”
If Fairfax County Public Schools isn’t promoting moral training in a secular religion, I don’t know what is. The irony is, the Supreme Court warned against this very type of pressure in banning prayer from school functions.
“There are heightened concerns with protecting freedom of conscience from subtle coercive pressure in the elementary and secondary public schools,” said the majority in Lee v. Weisman (1992). “What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.”
To transgender ideologues, pronoun affirmation is simply a “reasonable request,” but to a Christian (a “dissenter” from their new orthodoxy), this behavior in a school setting amounts to enforcing their religious orthodoxy. And because the controversy is over names and pronouns, students’ free speech is at stake, as well as freedom of religion.
Christian students in Fairfax County Public Schools will face an uphill battle against this increasingly intolerant culture—and what begins in a wealthy D.C. suburb will be quickly exported to other school districts as well.
One question Christian students will have to wrestle with is, how can they best honor all the authorities in their life when their parents say one thing, but their teachers say the opposite? (Home schoolers don’t face that question because their parents are their teachers.)
Parents should help prepare their children to wrestle with tough questions, face the world’s pressure to conform, and have a solid foundation on which to stand.
Parents bear the primary responsibility for educating their children. They should consider how best to protect their children from this gender insanity. Should they enroll them in a Christian school? Should they educate them at home? Should they run for school board? There are many good options, but “doing nothing” is not one of them
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/16/using-wrong-pronouns-could-lead-to-school-suspensions-in-virginia-public-schools
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The Left’s War on Children
What are we doing to our children?
The leaked news that the Supreme Court may be about to overturn its controversial 1973 Roe v. Wade decision has sent political shock waves across America. It’s also given new life to the left’s faux trope about “the right’s war on women.”
But if we take a step back and take an honest look at the bigger picture, the real war being waged in America is the left’s war against our own children.
Have we fully considered how many of our children will be able to survive the life-altering gauntlet that the left has put in front of them?
It was the phraseology in President Joe Biden’s recent comment about women having the right to choose to “abort a child” that crystalized this thought process in my mind.
For children, not being aborted is only the first obstacle in the left’s gauntlet. Just think about it:
—Even if children survive by not being aborted in the womb, or, as some extremists from the left have proposed, being aborted up to a few weeks after birth …
—Even if young students are not emotionally damaged, beginning at the lowest grades in school, by being exposed to complex sexual issues and graphic sexual images and concepts that are well beyond their age to comprehend …
—Even if many adolescents are able to maintain their self-confidence, despite attempts to purposefully confuse them by teaching them to question their inner selves with regard to race and gender …
—Even if our children are not coerced to alter the sanctity of their God-given biology, despite the overt efforts by school officials to glorify transitioning to another gender …
—Even if youth who have gender dysphoria survive government-sanctioned emotional brainwashing, surgical mutilation, and chemical castration, and do not commit suicide …
—Even if middle and high school students can avoid the trauma of inappropriate or criminal sexual contact by teachers, coaches, pastors, priests, camp counselors, and other adults in authority positions …
—Even if the rulings of our next new Supreme Court justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is soft on sex offenders and whose proclivity is to side with convicted child predators instead of victimized children and families, don’t give the sexually deviant more of an incentive to prey upon our children …
—Even if young women aren’t discouraged from participating in healthy athletics because their sport is dominated by males who say they are females …
—Even if students don’t suffer long-term consequences from harmful mask mandates and vaccinations that never should have been imposed or recommended for them …
—Even if students somehow graduate from schools that don’t adequately prepare them to become a productive and proud member of our society, instead trying to turn them into political advocates …
—Even if our children grow into psychologically and physically secure young adults, despite continual prompts to view themselves as victims and part of some aggrieved identity-politics group …
—Even if they navigate this outrageous gantlet that the left has erected …
With the weight of all of this upon their shoulders, what are the odds—and how can we expect—that we will have raised a generation of Americans with the strength and wisdom to care properly for themselves, their families, and their country?
Most of these issues shouldn’t fall within the purview of schools. No one-size-fits-all, government-centric approach ever can adequately address the diverse needs and values of America’s melting pot of families.
Indeed, education on these issues must come from only within the private walls of each family’s domain. We seem to have forgotten that parents are the true and ultimate teachers of our children.
Only with an intimate understanding of each young person, developing as a unique individual—as only a close family member may truly know—should these issues be addressed.
In extreme circumstances, for instance, absent a stable family environment or with deeply troubled youth, public dollars can provide families with choices to seek private, professional therapy.
But the left’s strategy to indoctrinate our youth is nowhere near over.
The next major issue will be claims of the declining mental health of our nation’s youth—and it might be true to some extent. And, of course, the agenda-driven left will be ready to rush in with its latest prescriptions and school curricula, including destructive policies that will further advance its agenda and, ultimately, only make matters worse.
However, what you and I know—and what I presume the left also knows but will never admit—is that it was the left’s prescriptions that caused whatever mental health issues may exist in the first place.
These are purposefully inflicted wounds that will leave lifelong scars on our nation’s most precious assets.
So again: What are we doing to our children?
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/09/the-lefts-war-on-children
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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19 May, 2022
‘Unrelenting Daily Confrontation’: After Roe Leak, Yale Law Students Call for Ostracizing Conservative Classmates and Tossing Out Constitution
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for students at Yale Law School, who are responding to news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade with calls to accost their conservative classmates through "unrelenting daily confrontation" and toss the Constitution by the wayside.
Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are "conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about." Why, she asked, are they still "coming to our parties" and "laughing in the library" without "unrelenting daily confrontation?"
Some of her classmates were less moderate.
"It’s not time for ‘reform,’" first-year law student Leah Fessler, a onetime New York Times freelancer, wrote on Instagram. "Democratic Institutions won’t save us." It is unclear how Fessler will apply that view as a legal intern this summer for federal judge Lewis Liman. Judge Liman did not respond to a request for comment.
Fessler isn’t alone. "Neither the constitution nor the courts—nor the f*cking illusion of ‘democracy’—are going to save us," first-year student Melisa Olgun posted. "How can we possibly expect a document, drafted by wealthy, white, landowning men, to protect those who face marginalization that is the direct result of the very actions of the founders?"
Contacted for comment, the students decried "leaks" of their social media posts and said the Washington Free Beacon was not "authorized" to publish them.
"This was posted PRIVATELY, on a private story, and was clearly leaked to you," Fessler said in an email, adding that the Free Beacon was "in no way authorized" to use the message.
"The post was on a private account on a private story that was sent to you without my knowledge," Olgun said. "You are in no way authorized to use it or my name in your story."
The replies may have been a tacit invocation of copyright laws that ban the dissemination of photos without their owner’s consent. Publishing private Instagram posts, a lawyer might argue, violates intellectual property rights, though Adam Candeub, an intellectual property expert at Michigan State University College of Law, called that argument "bullshit."
"It’s not clear copyright would even apply," Candeub said. "I wonder what they’re teaching at Yale Law School."
Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, said the copyright argument was a stretch. Jack Balkin, a First Amendment professor at Yale Law School, did not respond to a request for comment.
The reactions at Yale Law School, long ranked the top school in the country, reflect the radicalism of a younger generation of law students—and, some have speculated, of the leaker himself—who believe that long-standing legal norms perpetuate oppression.
Olgun, for one, lamented that the "‘liberal’ legal discipline will continue to bend over backwards to uphold the decorum, norms, and the sanctity of an institution that serves only those who benefit from originalism."
Such sentiments are widespread at Yale Law School. In March, nearly two-thirds of the student body signed an open letter condemning the Federalist Society for hosting a bipartisan panel on free speech.
The letter—which Fessler, Olgun, and Ramakrishna signed—also condemned the law school for calling "armed police" on "peaceful student protesters," who caused so much chaos at the panel that the speakers had to be escorted to a squad car outside.
Similar scenes have unfolded outside the homes of Supreme Court justices in the wake of the leak. Though it is illegal to picket a judge’s home "with the intent of influencing" a case, hundreds of protesters did just that to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, raising concerns about their safety. The Biden Administration does not appear to share those concerns: then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that "we certainly continue to encourage [peaceful protests] outside of judges' homes."
Congress has likewise taken a page from the Yale Law playbook. Days after a pro-life advocacy office was firebombed in Madison, Wis., House Democrats tried to kill a bipartisan bill that would beef up security for Supreme Court justices.
Nearly half those justices are graduates of Yale Law School, which churns out hundreds of law clerks each year. The school has an outsized effect on the legal system, producing a shocking volume of judges, academics, and government officials.
Since 1789, more than 4 percent of all federal judges have graduated from Yale Law. Alumni of the top-ranked school account for 17 percent of new law professors and three of the Federal Trade Commission’s five commissioners, including agency chair Lina Khan.
As the law school’s student body has radicalized, some judges are hoping to hem in its prestige. In March, D.C. Circuit judge Laurence Silberman warned his colleagues against hiring Yale students.
"The latest events at Yale Law School," Silberman wrote, "prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships."
https://freebeacon.com/campus/unrelenting-daily-confrontation-after-roe-leak-yale-law-students-call-for-ostracizing-conservative-classmates-and-tossing-out-constitution/
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America’s Leadership Crisis Extends to College Campuses
America needs leadership. We face great challenges as a nation, and in order to tackle them head on in a successful manner, we need effective leaders willing to stand up for what’s right. I plan to do my part as a nominee for the position of Regent at the University of Michigan.
I plan to make a positive difference for generations to come by joining the University of Michigan Board of Regents and by bringing common sense, accountability, transparency and a fresh perspective to the university.
Let’s face it. The University of Michigan is facing an identity crisis. Let’s restore its place as the greatest public university in the world, following a series of unacceptable actions by individuals in the highest positions of authority at the University.
Former university president, Dr. Mark Schlissel, was forced out in disgrace following what the University described as an “inappropriate relationship with a university employee.” The actions by Dr. Schlissel tarnished the integrity of the school and sowed distrust in the current university leadership.
The school was forced to pay one of the largest settlements in the history of higher education after the horrific actions of Dr. Robert Anderson came to light. The fact that Dr. Anderson reportedly assaulted young students for four decades is unconscionable and deserves further investigation.
I understand, firsthand, how sexual abuse can permanently impact an individual with trauma and feelings that are impossible to put into words. As a survivor of sexual assault and domestic abuse, I will tackle these issues head on and ensure everyone’s voice is heard.
For these reasons, and others, I chose to run for an unpaid and often thankless position on the University of Michigan Board of Regents. I’m doing it for my four-year-old daughter Emma, and for all of our children’s future.
This year, I am running as a change-maker. I will bring accountability and transparency to the University to ensure Michigan taxpayers know how and where their money is being spent.
I understand what it takes to get things done. I’ll fight for every Michigander, regardless of partisan political persuasion, because that’s what the role demands. As a member of the Board of Regents, I won’t be representing just Republicans or Democrats, I’ll represent all Michiganders and our common interests at the University of Michigan.
I’ll hold powerful people accountable and ensure Michigan families have a fair shot to send their children to the University. I am a fourth-generation graduate, and I want to ensure all Michiganders have a fair shot at attending.
I come from a family of hardworking immigrants and entrepreneurs. My mother’s father is Stanley Winkelman of Winkelman’s Stores and my father’s father is Eugene Epstein of Vesco Oil Corporation. My parents instilled in me the values that most Americans hold dear; work hard, treat people with respect, stand up for what’s right and give back what you can.
These values are tried and true.
We must ensure the school is preparing students for the future. Unfortunately, in many cases, graduates are often ill-equipped and ill-prepared for a good-paying job with mountains of debt. I will make sure the school keeps the focus on what matters and ceases to waste public money on superfluous
I attended Harvard University and graduated with a degree in Economics. I’m a proud Harvard graduate and learned so much during my four years in Cambridge. After graduating from Harvard, I returned home and joined the family business.
I attended the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business while working with the company and continue to serve on various community boards. I’ve continued to give back the community and now I am stepping up for my daughter’s future, and all of our children’s future.
It’s time for a change. It's time to restore Michigan’s greatness.
That’s why I’m running for the University of Michigan, Board of Regents. To restore Michigan’s greatness and ensure every Michigander can be proud of the Maize and Blue, because every Michigander is connected to the University of Michigan.
https://townhall.com/campaign-voices/lenaepstein/2022/05/19/americas-leadership-crisis-extends-to-college-campuses-n2607468
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After Backlash, NJ School Officials Dig Their Heels in on New Sex Ed Standards
Last month, New Jersey's new sex education and gender identity curriculum gained national attention, putting Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in the position of having to address the uproar.
At the time, he ordered the state Department of Education to review the standards, which were adopted two years ago, asking for "further clarification on what age-appropriate guidelines look like for our students."
He did, however, push back on what he claimed was a "distortion" of the standards.
"Unfortunately, our learning standards have been intentionally misrepresented by some politicians seeking to divide and score political points," the governor said in a statement, adding that he's "seen a handful of sample lesson plans being circulated that have not been adopted in our school districts and do not accurately reflect the spirit of the standards."
"Any proposed educational content that is not age-appropriate should be immediately revised by local officials," he continued.
But New Jersey school officials firmly rejected any attempt to revisit the standards, which are set to take effect in the fall.
The majority of state school board members and Acting Education Commissioner Angelica Allen-McMillan Wednesday defended a nearly two-year-old decision to include controversial topics, such as gender identity and abortion, in the state’s new sex education standards. […]
Four state school board members — Andrew Mulvihill, Jack Fornaro, Mary Beth Gazi, and Mary Beth Berry — voted against the revised sex education standards in 2020 and wrote a letter to Allen-McMillan Tuesday ahead of the board meeting. The letter requested a reexamination of the standards, removal of “some of the more controversial and graphic language,” and to delay implementation of the standards.
But, during the Wednesday meeting, Board President Kathy Goldenberg said there would not be a vote to postpone the implementation of the new standards, set to begin in September.
“At this point there will be no votes taken today,” Goldenberg said. “It’s not on the agenda. We won’t be doing it. It won’t happen.”
Allen-McMillan released a memo mid-April addressed to local district leaders that explained the “intent and spirit” of the sex education standards that were revised in June 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The previous standards were set in 2014. The 13-member New Jersey State Board of Education voted 9-4 to update the standards in a resolution after five months of discussion, public comment, and revisions.
“I firmly support the 2020 New Jersey Student Learning Standards in comprehensive health and physical education,” Allen-McMillan said at the meeting. “I recognize that the department can strengthen our efforts to clarify the meaning and scope of the standards for educators.”
She also said she “wholeheartedly disagrees” with critics of the revised standards. One of the guidelines that concerns critics requires second-graders to learn about the “range of ways people express their gender and how gender-role stereotypes may limit behavior.”
“These standards are designed to ensure that children understand that everyone has the ability to live their life in the way that suits them, no matter their gender,” Allen-McMillan said in her memo last month. “They should also help children to understand that every person deserves respect, no matter their identity or expression.” (Chalkbeat)
Allen-McMillan said she will wait for the state Attorney General's Office to weigh in, according to NJ.com.
"If there's a quorum to do something like that then we'll look at that, but at this point it's not even a remote possibility," she said.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2022/05/18/after-backlash-nj-school-officials-dig-their-heels-in-on-new-sex-ed-standards-n2607437
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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18 May, 2022
CUNY Law faculty back anti-Israel BDS resolution
The CUNY Law School faculty council approved an anti-Israel resolution supporting the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
The professors on May 12 voted to endorse the BDS resolution that previously passed the CUNY Law Student Government Association last December, a spokesperson for the law school said.
The vote was taken a day before CUNY Law School’s graduation ceremony last Friday. No other details about the vote were available on Wednesday.
The resolution discusses the disputed territories occupied by Israel in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
“The unceasing military occupation and colonization of Palestine by the Israeli state is a manifestation of both settler colonialism and structural racism, supported politically, financially, and militarily by the U.S,” the resolution said.
The resolution demanded that CUNY sever ties with Israel and accused the school of being “directly complicit in the ongoing apartheid, genocide, and war crimes perpetrated by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people through its investments in and contracts with companies profiting off of Israeli war crimes.”
The group called for the school to terminate student exchange programs with Israel and to join the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement against the nation.
The Israel-Palestinian dispute has raged in recent years among faculty and students at a number of City University of New York campuses. Students on both sides claim they have been subjected to bullying and discrimination.
Meanwhile, CUNY administrators — including Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez and campus presidents — recently returned from a mission to Israel. The mission was co-sponsored by the New York Jewish Community Relations Council and a clear indication that CUNY brass opposes the BDS movement.
The union representing CUNY professors also caused a stir last year by passing a one-sided resolution criticizing Israel aggression in the ongoing conflict. Pro-Israel professors quit CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress union in protest.
Not even ice cream has escaped the heated debate. Ben & Jerry’s provoked a backlash when it announced it would not sell its ice cream in the disputed territories.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/18/cuny-law-faculty-back-anti-israel-bds-resolution/
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The culture wars have crept into Oxbridge admissions
The characters in Sarah Vaughan’s thriller Anatomy of a Scandal include rich Oxford undergraduates from Eton whose main preoccupations are drinking and trashing rooms. They are what it is fashionable to call ‘privileged white males’; while the typical female Oxbridge student is ‘slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled… they knew they belonged there’. The truth, however, is that although Eton is one of the top academic schools in the country, its ‘beaks’ are puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of their brightest pupils gaining places at Oxbridge. The number of offers has halved between 2014 and 2021.
Not very different to Vaughan’s narrative is the argument of the Sutton Trust that we have a problem when 65 per cent of court judges were educated at independent schools. But some of these were at school half a century ago, in a very different educational setting. Much depends anyway on how the statistics are framed. Do such figures include the half-and-half category of direct grant schools, most of which are now independent but which admitted very large numbers of state-supported scholars?
Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, said last week that ‘we have to make it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge’. Actually, the colleges, not the university, choose whom to admit, but the selection of state school candidates in place of well-qualified competitors from private schools has been going on for a long time; it has simply become more obvious in the past few years. The university’s target figure for state school candidates has slowly crept upwards beyond three-quarters; but it was originally announced as a target (or, to use the current euphemism, ‘benchmark’), not a quota – I know because I was a member of the University Council then, and we were assured that what would always count in final consideration was candidates’ excellence.
So that meant going out and persuading state schools to send more applicants to Cambridge. It meant breaking down prejudices in some comprehensives which were telling their brightest students that Oxbridge was not for the likes of them. It is easy to play on the mystique of ivy-clad cloisters, ancient dining halls and arcane rituals, making what are much-loved traditions among a great many students of all backgrounds into deterrents, signs that the colleges were simply continuations of snobbish public schools whose members supposedly dominated Oxbridge social life and took pleasure in burning bank notes in front of beggars sleeping rough. But that snobbery is long gone. Entrance interviews turn on academic discussion, rather than the ability to catch a rugby ball.
To a remarkable extent these initiatives succeeded. Missions were sent to schools. ‘Access officers’ were appointed by colleges. Oxford and Cambridge were shown to be normal places, just like… just like what? They are not like anywhere except each other, and that is the reason for their stunning performance in the sciences and the humanities. Uniquely self-governing, containing a great variety of autonomous colleges, they possess secrets of success that mean they always stand at the top of the admittedly dubious international league tables. They provide a chance for undergraduates to ‘sit at the feet’, as one used to say, of some of the leading scholars and scientists in the world.
As more state schools match the performance levels of very good independent schools, it is only to be expected that more of their own candidates win places. Yet the TSA (‘Thinking Skills Assessment’) tests at Cambridge reveal some disturbing facts. Lately, successful candidates from private schools scored 73 on average, nearly five points higher than candidates from state schools. This worries many of those who teach maths and physics; their students have to cope with exceptionally challenging courses, and need to hit the ground running. In other words, candidates from one type of school with better scores are being turned away in favour of those from another type of school with lower scores.
So much for the claim made by the university’s spokesman in response to criticism of Toope’s comments: ‘The University of Cambridge does not discriminate against any applicant.’ Positive discrimination exists, and the other side of the same coin is negative discrimination against well-qualified candidates, who are often dismissed as ‘well-taught’, taking the credit away from the candidate. The head of one leading independent school asked me: ‘Where does meritocracy end and social engineering begin?’
Evidence of a deprived background (‘contextual data’) may well justify a difficult choice between closely matched candidates, in favour of the disadvantaged one. But when 35 per cent of independent school pupils receive some sort of bursary, sometimes total exemption from fees, it is clear that a very blunt instrument is being applied. Nor is it just those on very low incomes who may need help. I was governor of a school where we were discussing a rise in fees, to which I objected on ‘squeezed middle-class’ grounds, and was told by another governor, a delightful and wealthy man with rather limited horizons: ‘Well, they can forgo their winter skiing holiday.’ But that was a serious misrepresentation of the dilemma many parents face about where to find the money for school fees.
One hears academics saying: ‘The state-to-independent ratio is better this year.’ In what sense can one possibly say it is better? Maybe it is better because the Office for Students is less likely to threaten to claw back fees, as it can in theory do if the university is short of its target – but the idea that admissions to university are subject to an opinionated bureaucracy blindly pursuing its ideological objectives is deeply troubling.
Toope admits the crudity of making ‘state school’ a criterion for admission when he says the figures need to be broken down to identify selective grammar schools, which account for a significant proportion of state admissions. The implication that here too candidates will eventually suffer discrimination has already created outrage. The Times made public a case where a candidate from a state grammar school had a very high score of 82 in the TSA but was not even invited for interview. Of course there is, and should be, more to admissions than that score: a letter of reference, a personal statement, ideally the interview too. Creating a mix of students from different backgrounds who can strike sparks off each other is a desirable objective.
At the moment the really disadvantaged candidates are arguably the white males from outstanding independent schools. If they are rejected by their first-choice college and placed in the ‘pool’ so other colleges can look at their application, they nearly all sink without trace. So they go instead to Durham, St Andrews, Bristol and other Russell Group universities, excellent places – but, as Toope has hinted, they too are under pressure to cut numbers from certain types of school. One head talked to me about a potential brain drain as some of the best and brightest head to Harvard and Princeton, maybe never to return to Britain.
It is vital to remember that admitting students is all about individuals. University admissions have become another site for culture wars in which ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ are terms of disapproval, linked together to justify injustice. Imagined class must not determine admissions. School names should probably be omitted from application forms. Penalising applicants for their parents’ choice of school ‘strips the pupil of any agency’, to quote one distinguished head. It is a betrayal of the principles by which a great university has flourished.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/whos-out
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Critical race theory-related ideas found in mandatory programs at 39 of top 50 US medical schools
At least 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical colleges and universities have some form of mandatory student training or coursework on ideas related to critical race theory (CRT), according to CriticalRace.org, which monitors CRT curricula and training in higher education.
Earlier this year, CriticalRace.org found that CRT was prevelant in medical schools across the country. The project from Legal Insurrection Foundation, a non-profit devoted to campus free speech and academic freedom, has since expanded its database and found even more elite medical schools are focusing on "racialization" of medicine.
"The national alarm should be sounding over the racialization of medical school education. The swiftness and depth to which race-focused social justice education has penetrated medical schools reflects the broader disturbing trends in higher education," Legal Insurrection founder William A. Jacobson told Fox News Digital.
Jacobson, a clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, founded CriticalRace.org’s extensive database that has also examined elite K-12 private schools and 500 of America's top undergraduate programs.
The schools examined were based on the rankings by U.S. News’ rankings of America’s top medical schools. The latest findings show that 39 of the top 50 medical schools "have some form of mandatory student training or coursework" related to CRT and 38 offered materials by authors Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, whose books explicitly call for discrimination, according to Jacobson.
"Mandatory so-called 'anti-racism' training centers ideology, not patients, as the focus of medical education. This is a drastic change from focusing on the individual, rather than racial or ethnic stereotypes," Jacobson said.
Training is sometimes targeted, such as a new requirement for a major or department, and sometimes school-wide. The subjects of mandatory training and coursework are worded and phrased differently at individual schools, but use terms including "anti-racism," "cultural competency," "equity," "implicit bias," "DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion" and critical race theory, according to CriticalRace.org.
In 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) committed to utilizing CRT in a variety of ways and criticized the idea that people of different backgrounds should be treated the same. All 50 schools examined by CriticalRace.org are accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which sponsors the Association of American Medical Colleges, which has also taken steps to support anti-racist initiatives, and the AMA.
Earlier this year, guidance issued by the Biden administration stated certain individuals may be considered "high risk" and more quickly qualify for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19 based on their "race or ethnicity."
The study found that 12 schools have department-specific mandatory training, including The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University’s Committee on Anti-Racism and Equity (CARE) that established Discussing Anti-Racism and Equity (DARE) as an "educational intervention aimed at emergency medicine frontline providers."
According to CriticalRace.org, the curriculum for these medical students includes "conferences on racism and equity, simulations, reading groups, and film screenings integrated into the existing education at Brown in order to ‘encourage anti-racist attitudes and behaviors’ and to provide ‘equitable and actively anti-racist care’ by assessing implicit bias and structural racism."
The study also found that 17 schools have school-wide mandatory training, including Albert Einstein College of Medicine and University of Utah School of Medicine. These trainings at these schools consist of modules, online orientations, orientation programs and all other forms of training that fall short of an academic course, according to CriticalRace.org.
CriticalRace.org found that 28 of the 50 schools have school-wide mandatory curricula, such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), CRT or similar elements embedded into the general curriculum of the university. The Ohio State University School of Medicine and Keck School of Medicine of USC are among the schools that fall into this category.
"Almost all medical students will have attended colleges and universities awash in so-called 'anti-racism' social justice educational and training mandates," Jacobson said. "These concepts will not be new to them, but they are attending medical school to learn about medicine and patient care, not as a refresher course on undergraduate race-focused education."
He believes "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion entrenched bureaucracies promote, protect and relentlessly expand their administrative territory in medical schools," but the resources should instead be used "to expand medical knowledge and patient care, not to enforce an ideological viewpoint."
The study found that 28 schools also have some sort of mandatory training for faculty or staff, which can either be department specific or implemented school-wide.
CriticalRace.org found that everything from onboarding new hires to filling out faculty research applications can include terms such as anti-racism, cultural competency, DEI, equity, implicit bias and critical race theory.
Jacobson’s team at CriticalRace.org isn’t finished putting a spotlight on the situation that many feel is plaguing medical schools across the nation.
"We expect to roll out a visual interactive map of our medical school database, to accompany our higher ed map, as part of a broader expansion of CriticalRace.org in the near future," Jacobson said.
Last month, nonprofit organization Do No Harm was launched to fight back against radical progressive ideology in the healthcare industry while promoting fairness, equal access, and the best, most personalized treatment for every patient.
"We are a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda," the organization’s website explains.
A recent Marist Poll, sponsored by Do No Harm, found a mere 28% of Americans feel elevating race or ethnicity as a more significant risk factor over medical history in determining the type of treatment prescribed for patients would be beneficial
Defenses of CRT-associated materials have ranged from outright denying CRT is being taught, to claiming that the underlying ideas are key to creating an inclusive educational environment.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/critical-race-theory-medical-schools-report
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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17 May, 2022
Indiana, Louisiana high schools helping low-income students earn associate, bachelor's degrees
A handful of high schools in some of the country's toughest neighborhoods created a curriculum to help low-income students earn college credits while attending high school.
Kevin Teasley, founder of the nonprofit Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation, told Fox News his schools empower students to do more than what traditional schools allow them to do.
Its flagship location, 21st Century Charter School in Gary, Indiana, was founded in 2005. The GEO Next Generation High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was developed three years ago, and the GEO Next Generation High School in Indianapolis was launched during the pandemic.
When Teasley opened his first school in Gary, he had a mission to combat the high school dropout rate in the area, which was about 50%. He wanted to inspire kids to not only go to college but graduate college.
For several years, he implemented various college prep courses to help students ready themselves for the transition to college. They worked on college applications and toured college campuses.
However, Teasley realized it wasn't working.
He came to the conclusion that the students he was trying to help already had the mindset that they weren't going to college because no one in their families had gone before them. About 90% of the households in the area didn't have a college graduate, Teasley said.
In 2010, one of Teasley's brightest students, Vincent, said he was dropping out of school. He was 16 years old and just finishing up his sophomore year.
"He looked at me, and he said, 'Look, nobody in my family went to college. I'm not going to college. And my family needs me to bring money home to help pay the bills,'" Teasley recalled.
To convince him to stay, Teasley told his star student that if he passed the college entrance exam, he would pay for him to take college courses while in high school.
"It's not that he didn't want to go to college … he didn't think he could afford it," Teasley said. "He didn't think he was college material, and he didn't think anybody supported him."
That's when Teasley realized he needed to replace the old way of doing things. Rather than focusing on the process, Teasley said he started focusing on each individual student.
It all started with Vincent.
"We supported him the whole way. And two years later, he not only graduated from our high school on time, he graduated as the first student in northwest Indiana history to actually earn a full associate degree," he said. "Two years of college while in high school."
To celebrate, Teasley brought all students from kindergarten through 12th grade into the gym to celebrate Vincent's success.
Now, every high school student who walks through the halls of one of Teasley's schools has that same opportunity, and it's free of charge. Teasley's program covers the cost of tuition, books, transportation, counseling and academic support.
When the students are not taking their regular high school classes, they're sitting in class on a college campus. Students in Gary can take courses at Indiana University Northwest, Purdue University Northwest or Ivy Tech Community College.
Students in Louisiana take courses at Baton Rouge Community College, and students in Indianapolis take classes at Ivy Tech, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and Marian University.
"Instead of taking English 11 in 11th grade, they take English 101 at the college level," which counts for a high school and college credit, Teasley said.
Over the last 10 years, 50 students at the flagship school in Gary have earned an associate degree while in high school, and one student earned a bachelor's degree.
Today, the graduation rate at the school in Gary is 95%. The school's college readiness rate is also 90%, compared to the local high school rate of 37%.
"Remember, we're coming out of an environment where most people are dropping out of high school," Teasley said. "They're not accustomed to graduating from high school, and they're certainly not accustomed to going to college."
The schools in Louisiana and Indianapolis are only a few years old. However, students at both schools are already on track to earn associate degrees next year, according to Teasley.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/indiana-louisiana-high-schools-helping-low-income-students-associate-bachelor-degrees
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Student Loan Forgiveness Hurts Most Americans
You may have seen over the past two weeks dozens of articles emerging detailing the Biden Administration’s plans to address the student loan debt crisis in the United States via executive fiat. While plans to cancel student loans may ostensibly sound noble, they actually penalize the majority of Americans who do not have a college degree. Instead of promoting personal responsibility, the Biden Administration is championing a plan that will increase taxes on the lowest earners in our nation to subsidize educational decisions made by the highest earners. This plan to cancel student loan debt amounts to nothing more than political prodigality designed to secure young people’s vote in the elections to come.
When I was 18 years old I decided to attend Saint Anselm College in my home state of New Hampshire. It made the most sense for me given that I was awarded an athletic scholarship alongside some additional scholarship money based on academic merit. While the scholarship funds did help lower the cost of college, I too graduated college with some student loan debt. After graduating, I got a job and began paying off my remaining student loans. This experience is becoming less common as my generation has unfortunately experienced rising costs in higher education and coupled that with poor decisions on their choice of college.
However, attending college at the end of the day is a personal choice and that consequences the follow should not be thrust upon those who did not decide to go to college. Accordingly, it should not be a surprise to hear that the majority of student loan debt is owned by higher income households. For example, according to the Brookings Institution, the highest income households—defined as those who make nearly $75,000 per year—owe almost 60% of the outstanding education debt and comprise of over three quarters of those payments. Comparatively, lower income households only make up 20% of the outstanding student debt in the United States and fill the remaining quarter of payments. However, those who do go to college, on average, make more than those who do not and therefore the decision to go to college is one that can pay off in the long run.
Yet, many Americans make the equally judicious decision for themselves not to attend college and therefore are not subject to the over-encumbering financial burdens that often follow higher education. Why should they be forced to subsidize the decisions made by others?
Furthermore, American colleges and universities have increasingly become centers of indoctrination for progressive and woke policies. No longer are colleges sources of rigorous debate and intellectual discourse. This trend has also turned many hardworking Americans who love and support our country away from these institutions as they have grown increasingly hostile to the bedrocks of American society. Additionally, there are plenty of alternatives for those looking to secure a good life for themselves and their families.
Instead of cancelling student loan debt, the Biden Administration should support things like trade schools as did its predecessor. In 2020, the Department of Education proposed a doubling of federal commitment to provide states with funds for career and technical education, boosting funding from roughly $1.2 billion to over $2 billion. This investment would have been the first major federal investment in vocational education in over two decades. Yet, the Biden Administration has seemingly ignored such plans and continues its quest to cancel student loan debt. Outside of promoting vocational schools, joining the military is a great career path for many young men and women looking to give back to their country and enjoy great life-starting benefits in return for their service to the nation.
Unfortunately, the Biden Administration refuses to promote such alternatives and instead is asking millions of Americans without college degrees to foot the trillion-dollar bill for those who made their own decision to go to college.
As a member of Gen-Z, I understand the reality we face when deciding to go to college, yet ultimately personal responsibility must be at the forefront. When deciding if and where to go to college, it is a risk that we take and must deal with the consequences—such as thousands of dollars of debt. We cannot force others to subsidize the decisions that we made because of the costs that follow. Furthermore, the cancelling of student loan debt will hurt the millions of Americans who decided to forge their own paths in a different way, while crushing lower income households in the face of record-breaking inflation.
The Biden Administration must end this woke charade for votes and actually begin enacting policies that work for all of the American people, no matter their level of education.
https://townhall.com/campaign-voices/karolineleavitt/2022/05/16/student-loan-forgiveness-hurts-most-americans-n2607233
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Critical Race Theory and Small-Town America
Like so many other small hamlets across the U.S., critical race theorists have dragged Pickens’ K-12 school system into the spotlight.
Pickens County, S.C., is home to the college football powerhouse Clemson University. Any headlines about this county, all 512-square miles of it, usually involve the Tigers. But like so many other small hamlets across the U.S., critical race theorists have dragged Pickens’ K-12 school system into the spotlight.
In April, Pickens Middle School officials sent a letter to school parents saying that children would be segregated by race for lunch on April 15th. The racial segregation would be part of a program to help students “cope with being a student in a predominantly white school,” according to the message school leaders sent to parents.
Critical race theorists are making their message that everything in public and private life represents a racial power struggle ubiquitous in K-12 institutions. As I explain in my book, Splintered: Critical Race Theory and the Progressive War on Truth, parents around the country are reporting similar racially-focused lessons and school programs in their schools.
For example, Scarlett Johnson describes her town in Wisconsin’s Mequon-Thiensville School District as “quiet, friendly, nice.” But then she began noticing lesson plans and other activities that did not focus on skills and facts but on personal “identity” and claims that America is systemically oppressive. Much of the material was “focused on making kids social justice warriors,” Scarlett says.
Scarlett launched a campaign to recall her district’s school board members. Shortly after the campaign launched, she found herself the object of a New York Times’ feature claiming “Republicans are using fears of critical race theory to drive school board recalls.”
Really? In a survey of the literature describing the ways in which critical race theory is used in K-12 schools, two University of Utah professors who promote the theory wrote in 2015:
Within the span of the last two decades, critical race theory (CRT) has become an increasingly permanent fixture in the toolkit of education researchers seeking to critically examine educational opportunities, school climate, representation, and pedagogy, to name a few.
The professors then added, “CRT has evolved into a type of revolutionary project.... [W]e owe it to ourselves, and others, to help safeguard CRT.”
By the theorists’ own admission, then, parents are not just imagining that critical race theory haunts school lessons. In response, parents such as Scarlett are leading school board recall efforts to protect children from discrimination. Advocacy groups such as Parents Defending Education are reporting activities such as those at Pickens Middle School to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and filing lawsuits arguing that districts such as Pickens are violating the Civil Rights Act.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers are introducing proposals that say no teacher or student should be compelled to affirm or believe any idea, but especially not ideas that violate federal or state civil rights laws.
Before dismissing such proposals as attempts to prevent white students from feeling “discomfort,” parents, taxpayers and members of the media should look closer at what critical race theorists are claiming—and what the theory inevitably causes: Discrimination. Those who claim parents are simply creating things to be afraid of should be ashamed that any child would face bias and prejudice, in school or out of school.
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/critical-race-theory-and-small-town-america?
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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16 May, 2022
I’ve faced many dangers, but the screaming hate of campus woke warriors left me shaking with fear
JULIE BINDEL explains how female students are bullied out of hearing from feminists
In 2004 Julie Bindel wrote an article criticising transgender activists who tried to close a rape crisis centre which wouldn’t include transwomen as counsellors
She received criticism and abuse when she gave a speech on feminism at York University, and was labelled as transphobic
She says that she will now be giving up on the university staff who enable behaviour that has prohibited female students hearing from feminists
"Even as I accepted the invitation, I knew there would be trouble. The moment it got out that evil, monstrous Julie Bindel was to set foot on campus at York University, it was all entirely predictable.
In the old, logical days, long-standing feminist campaigners like me would often be invited to universities by student feminist groups.
But in 2004, I wrote an article criticising transgender activists who tried to close down a rape crisis centre which wouldn’t include male-bodied transwomen as counsellors, and ever since I have been dogged by so-called progressives who consider me ‘transphobic’.
As a result university feminist groups, which nowadays are stuffed with just these ‘progressives’ and barely focus on women at all, largely consider me persona non grata and demand that I be banned from all events.
It was a sign of the times that the group that invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but trouble immediately materialised and both the feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled. But my hosts did not back down and, pledging to guarantee the safety of both students and speaker, rescheduled the talk. It happened last week, in an atmosphere I found both deeply disturbing and profoundly distressing.
The night before, I woke in the small hours dreading what I would face. I admit to feeling horribly anxious and on the verge of cancelling. I’d seen social media posts organising a protest and knew I’d have to go on my own. Stringent security measures imposed by the university meant that only students and staff could be present.
I heard the noise before I saw the crowd. ‘Bindel, out!’ ‘Not welcome on our campus,’ ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. I could have cried. How has this mad transgender ideology so captured the female students who, just a few years ago, would have welcomed me warmly as a mentor?
There were four burly guards who told me they’d first have to do a sweep of the room for smoke bombs and weapons. No one was allowed water bottles, in case someone threw one at me.
My heart started racing and my mouth was dry. Here I was, a feminist preparing to give a talk on male violence, being told that I could well be attacked. At that stage I almost walked out, but I knew that the humiliation would be too much to bear.
I couldn’t let the bullies win. I told myself I had been through this before. Yes, at Edinburgh University in 2019 I encountered verbal abuse, and one individual who physically lunged at me, but there weren’t many protesters then, and a fair number wanted to hear me. This time was the worst I’ve ever known it. I’d been told most students had been scared away, so I’d be in a room with fewer than 20 people, while 100 were outside, screaming my name.
My hands were shaking. I could not let the protesters see how sick I was feeling, so I approached some of them and tried to speak to them, but was blocked by a man who kept pushing a sign in my face: ‘Not on our campus’.
Every time I tried to take a photograph to record what was happening to me, he would thrust the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it.
Someone waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans d***’. Students — and a few members of staff — shouted vile things at me through megaphones. Female students turned their backs on me. It felt aggressive and hugely, horribly personal. I have reported from war zones — these were just a bunch of students. And yet it was devastating to hear them scream at me.
The few young women I did manage to talk to told me that my presence was ‘literal violence’. They told me I was a transphobe and a ‘whorephobe’ (I campaign against the sex trade). They shouted that there were 1,300 ‘sex worker’ students at York, and that I was a danger to them. I could have sobbed at the injustice of it.
Back in the room, I began: ‘Imagine that you have heard nothing at all about me, do not know me by reputation, except that I’m a feminist who has fought all her life to end rape and domestic violence.’ I said this because I had noticed two students from the demonstration were there, glaring at me. The talk went smoothly, but I honestly couldn’t wait to get out.
Healthy debate is impossible in that atmosphere, but what makes me saddest of all is that the women who scream at me have such a poor understanding of feminism and of me and my work. They criticise a mad, mangled parody. And, yes, it really does affect me. I feel unjustly attacked.
I became a feminist activist aged 17. This was in 1979, when sexism was brutal, in your face and constant. I faced it as a cleaner in a pub. The landlord sexually harassed me, then tried to rape me. I escaped, and found sisterhood in my feminist group.
One of the first campaigns I was involved in was to criminalise rape within marriage, which only became illegal in 1992. Since then, I have set up organisations such as Justice for Women, which highlights the injustice of sentences handed down to women such as Sally Challen, jailed for life after killing her sadistically abusive husband.
Somehow this has led campaigners to believe that I’m inciting violence, peddling hatred, or even ‘literally’ perpetrating violence. It’s an upside-down world when I’m the one who is ‘dangerous’ and a ‘bigot’.
How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality? I speak all over the world on the global sex trade and its harm to women and girls, including at the United Nations. I have campaigned with sex trade survivors to change the law so that women convicted of prostitutionrelated offences have their records expunged.
Yet one twenty-something activist felt moved to mischaracterise my beliefs to her social media followers in this way: ‘Bindel is an advocate for the Nordic model. This is a model that criminalises sex-working individuals and denies them worker rights, which has been proven to put them at an increased risk of rape, murder, and coercion.
‘Bindel’s whole career is founded in supporting the mass homicide of sex workers.’ Mass homicide? Of women I’ve campaigned alongside for 40 years?
It feels like they are looking at me through a funhouse mirror and using my distorted reflection to mock my life’s work. And yet it is me that they accuse of hate speech. Maybe you think the treatment I suffered at York University shouldn’t affect me by now. I am an older media professional with a successful career and public profile, and they are just students, exercising their right to protest.
My life’s work has been trashed by lies
But this is as callous as it is disingenuous. I am not a robot. I have feelings. My life’s work, much of it activism and therefore unpaid, has been trashed by these protesters who spin lies about me.
After my hideous ordeal, I met a group of young women who were keen to talk about the real issues — sexual harassment, rape on campus — and it gave me a sliver of hope.
But how angry it makes me that they have to sneak around and hide their views; that female students are being bullied out of hearing from feminists who have actually achieved something and can help.
I went to bed feeling deeply depressed, unable to sleep. This time was different. I’m still not over it. I feel upset when I think about it. I think I always will. At the moment, academia feels like a closed door to feminists like me. After running the gauntlet through a hail of horrid insults and damaging untruths, I made a decision.
I won’t be giving up on young women — far from it — but for now, I will be giving up on British universities whose staff enable such behaviour
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10806353/JULIE-BINDEL-explains-female-students-bullied-hearing-feminists.html
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As Parents Resisted Transgender Push, Teacher Suggested Sending in Child Services
If Erin Lee had known what her 12-year-old daughter would be exposed to during an afterschool “art club” last May, she would have never allowed her to go.
It began innocently enough. Lee received a text from her daughter asking if she could stay late for an “art club” at Wellington Middle School near Fort Collins, Colorado.
What happened next, though, would change their lives forever.
The “art club” was actually a meeting of the school’s Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) club, a group dedicated to supporting homosexuality, transgenderism, and other nontraditional ideas about gender and sexuality.
When the leader told Amanda (name changed to protect the minor) she must be “queer” if she didn’t feel sexually attracted to anybody, and that she must be “transgender” if she didn’t feel fully comfortable in her own body, the shy little girl suspected something wasn’t right.
According to Amanda, that same leader told her not to tell her parents about what would be discussed that day.
The woman in charge, Kimberly Chambers, who works as a “health equity initiatives coordinator” for Larimer County and director of the pro-LGBT organization SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado, also handed out her personal contact information to the children and urged them to contact her anytime.
Chambers’s organization has boasted of teaching children ages 12 to 16 about “polyamory”—relationships with multiple sexual partners simultaneously—and other controversial ideas.
During the afterschool GSA club, according to Amanda, Chambers explained to the children that their family homes may not be a “safe space,” but that there were “resources” available. She also handed out transgender flags and stickers that Amanda understood were supposed to represent the children in the club.
As soon as Lee picked up her daughter at school, it was clear that something was “off,” the mother told The Epoch Times in a series of interviews about the incident.
Amanda, looking confused, showed her mother the transgender paraphernalia she had received from Chambers. The transgender flag represented her, Amanda told her mom.
“My heart started racing and my mind blacked out,” Lee recounted. “I was in so much shock that I struggled to get out any words.”
Even though the GSA leader at school had told Amanda it was OK to lie to her parents, Amanda knew better. Over the days that followed, she told her parents everything, Lee said.
Amanda’s parents could hardly believe what they were hearing. Lee, who has described herself as an “ally of the LGBTQ community” and said she has a history of voting “pretty progressively on social issues,” was appalled.
But that would be just the beginning of an ordeal that continues to haunt the family.
The Fallout
Amanda never went back to the school after that. Instead, her parents put her in a local Christian school, even though it meant Lee would have to work nights to afford it. But as Lee and her husband saw it, there was no other choice.
Despite that Amanda was pulled out of Wellington Middle School, the family’s difficulties grew.
After the lesson, Amanda began to wonder whether she might truly be queer and transgender. Her mental state began to rapidly deteriorate, her mother said.
Multiple family members confirmed to The Epoch Times that prior to what Lee describes as the “grooming” of her daughter at school, Amanda never showed any signs of “gender dysphoria,” the term used by psychiatrists to describe discomfort with one’s biological sex.
Afterward, though, it was hard for the girl to shake the idea.
Lee and her husband, who was outraged by the ordeal, struggled for months with how to talk to their daughter about what had happened.
“We didn’t want to say something that would push her further into this dark hole or further into this transgender label,” Lee said. “And we did exactly what the trusted adults who indoctrinated her told her we would do. We played right into their narrative.”
Weeks after the incident, as her mental state got worse, the parents decided to take Amanda to a therapist. The therapist also ended up being “queer” and sought to affirm the young girl’s confusion about her gender.
By December, between the COVID isolation and the questions surrounding her gender, Amanda’s mental state was spiraling downward, Lee said.
The pediatrician immediately prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs for depression—medications that Amanda has since been weaned from—in an attempt to deal with the crisis.
“I don’t know if that fear will ever go away,” Lee said about her own concerns. “I don’t expect to ever stop being struck with sadness about what happened.”
Fighting Back
The more she thought about the whole ordeal, the more Lee realized she had to do something.
First, she contacted Chambers, the woman who Lee says “groomed” her daughter and who also sometimes works as a substitute teacher for the district. “Her response was alarming,” Lee said. “It was delusional. She doubled down on her actions.”
Next, she contacted the principal, who seemed empathetic but confirmed that secret GSA meetings with children were an intentional part of creating a “safe space” at school.
There are more than two dozen self-proclaimed LGBT children in the small middle school, according to social media posts by SPLASH. And the district is determined that they be “affirmed” without parental involvement, Lee said.
After all that, Lee spoke out at a school board meeting and contacted all its members by email. None responded. When she was finally able to sit down with two of them, they both “supported everything that transpired and refused to address any of my concerns.”
Finally, exasperated and realizing her first call would have been to the police if this had occurred on a playground or any other setting, Lee contacted the sheriff’s office.
While law enforcement was deeply sympathetic to her plight, and urged her to speak out loudly, there was nothing they could do from a legal perspective, Lee said.
District officials, meanwhile, saw nothing wrong with what had occurred, she said. Indeed, some expressed shock that a parent would be upset over the incident.
As Lee fought back, school officials were working on their next move.
Among other tactics, documents and communications obtained by The Epoch Times revealed a discussion about the possibility of reporting the parents to child-welfare authorities.
When Chambers was informed by the art teacher that Amanda’s parents had not been sending her to school since the incident, Chambers wrote back urging her to consider filing a report and have child-protection officials visit the home.
“If that persists, you’ll want to talk to admin about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school,” Chambers wrote, describing upset parents as “barriers” and citing an “extreme case” in which a family did not allow their transgender child to leave the home unsupervised.
Lee was flabbergasted after receiving the documents.
“I knew this woman was evil, but I didn’t see this coming,” she said. “This teacher and Kimberly [Chambers] forced us to pull our child out of school by creating an unsafe environment, then discussed sending CPS into our home because we pulled her out, at our most vulnerable moment as a family—that they caused.
“If my child had indicated that we were not affirming her pronouns and trans identity, I believe the authorities would’ve taken our child away. And everyone involved knew this.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/as-parents-resisted-transgender-push-teacher-suggested-sending-in-child-services_4443600.html
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Transgender Infusion Takes Over School Systems: Enter the Pronoun Pin
“Learning only happens when students feel like they belong.”
That is the vision according to the Oregon Episcopal School website. That’s right-Episcopal. In this new age of gender-awakening and fluidity, the Director of the school’s Center for Learning and Teaching, Asha Appel, is taking full advantage.
The new push is “pronoun pins,” the latest stop on the road to inclusivity. Available to all OES employees, students, and their families, there are three pin messages: He-Him, She-Her, and They-Them—and they come in a handful of different colors. “OES teachers want students to know that their classrooms are spaces where students have voice and agency,” says Appel. “A teacher wearing a button declaring their own pronouns creates an inclusive classroom for kids who are working on their identity.
By wearing a button, the teacher is saying ‘you can safely share your pronouns here.” ‘All-School Equity Coach’ Willow McCormick added the following : “If we are trying to create an atmosphere of belonging, where every child at OES feels seen, known, and accepted, then it’s the impetus on adults to set the tone and conditions for that sharing of self. What I’ve seen in other places is the burden falls to the student who doesn’t exist within the gender binary to educate all of the adults about who they are and that the gender spectrum exists.”
With seemingly no hesitation or limitations, this training continues throughout academia as well all over our nation, many times with or without parental knowledge or consent, leading to a singular, sobering conclusion: this is more prevalent than most would dare consider, and more deeply rooted than most would dare believe. How did we get here?
Changing Definitions
In 2004, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary listed the term, “Trans-gender” this way: “having personal characteristics(as transsexuality and transvestism) that transcend traditional gender boundaries and corresponding sexual norms.” Even then, the individuals cited were generally adults (and by and large male) who had made this decision as an adult, and rarely if at all, sought to change his sex. In addition, the Williams Institute records that only 0.6%, or about 1.4 million identified as such based on a 2016 report.
However, something has changed.
Within the last few years, a relatively new trend has begun; not just in our homes-but in our schools. An unprecedented surge in girls, not boys-questioning their sexuality, as well as their gender, and seeking to change it. This is being done in most cases, or in many cases, WITHOUT parental endorsement and assistance. This was predominately an area that had been long since dominated by males not females. Nevertheless, the encouragement and push urging questioning girls to become transgender men is at an all-time high. While this was once an anomaly-it is now by and large a well endorsed part of our social construct-and academia has clearly taken notice.
https://theblacksphere.net/2022/05/transgender-infusion-takes-over-school-systems/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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15 May, 2022
Florida to Teach Students About Evils of Communism. Some on the Left Aren’t Happy About It
Florida students will now learn about the evils of communist totalitarianism, thanks to the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis signed HB 395 into law on Monday, creating a “Victims of Communism Day” in which middle school students will receive at least 45 minutes of instruction every Nov. 7 on topics “such as Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, [Josef] Stalin and the Soviet system, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and Nicolas Maduro and the Chavismo movement.”
It’s a remarkably positive step.
Given the fact that the struggle against communism was the primary focus of American society and foreign policy for generations and that communism still threatens us today, isn’t it appropriate that high school students learn something about it?
Not according to some on the modern left.
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato told me on Twitter that Florida’s initiative is just “political posturing.” Teaching high school students about the murderous regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, and other communists is “red baiting,” according to some in the media.
If that’s “red baiting,” then what would you call teaching students about Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust? Surely, young Americans should know about that.
A Miami Herald columnist, Fabiola Santiago, who is from Cuba, ranted that teaching a lesson about communism to students is itself just like communism.
Interestingly, we didn’t get those same comparisons when California mandated a full semester on ethnic studies for students to graduate high school. Some of the people and groups who spearheaded that initiative and shaped the model curriculum were Marxists.
Is it so ridiculous to set aside a single day each year—in a state with many refugees from communism—to talk about an ideology that has done so much harm in the world and has threatened to overthrow free societies around the globe?
Yes, according to Jezebel, which actually went with the line that “true” communism hasn’t been tried yet.
“For any impressionable Florida kids that may be reading this, please note that there have never been any ‘true’ communist countries, owing largely to violent intervention from the U.S. and other Western superpowers,” wrote Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung.
It would have all worked if not for that pesky United States!
Cheung also mocked the contention that communism has killed 100 million people. That’s some kind of right-wing fantasy pulled out of thin air, apparently.
To the contrary, historian David Satter wrote in The Wall Street Journal that communist regimes have killed on an “industrial scale.”
The numbers are staggering.
“In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies,” Satter wrote. “This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics, and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.”
When you count the victims not just of the Soviet Union, but of the various communist regimes it was linked to, “including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” Satter calculated, the number is about 100 million.
Even apart from communism’s lethality is the destructive nature of communism on the living. The ideology destroys economies, strips citizens of basic rights, saps them of their spirit, deprives them of religion and faith, and reduces them to slavery in the name of equality.
Just days after DeSantis signed the Florida legislation, Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen, a 90-year-old retired archbishop, was arrested by Chinese authorities for his support of democracy in Hong Kong.
The evil of communism is still very much with us.
Unfortunately, young Americans are woefully uninformed about communism and the Cold War. According to a poll conducted in 2016, about one-third of millennials thought that more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Stalin.
More recent polls show that Gen Z is also generally ignorant about communism.
One of the foundational reasons for publicly funded education in America is to cultivate self-governing citizens of a republic. Giving American students a basic understanding of the differences between a free society, like ours, and totalitarian societies is essential.
How can they even understand our own country’s flaws if they have nothing to compare them against or to contextualize them?
Students should learn about the history of slavery and racism in America. What the left-wing education establishment increasingly wants is to mandate teaching about those things to the exclusion of anything else.
Even more, it wants to inject lessons in history and even science and math with warped ideology—such as critical race theory—that actually make us more racist and less free.
Its initiatives create an extremely distorted picture of the United States.
Throughout its history, America has been a symbol of liberty. In the 20th century, after a remarkable rise in power, it played an active role in opposition to totalitarianism on behalf of free people.
First was the fight in World War II against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—the triumph of which would have created a new dark age.
Next was the long, twilight struggle—as liberal President John F. Kennedy called it—against the Soviet Union and international Marxism. The goal of the Soviet Union, stated very plainly, was to bury the United States and free societies, to push Western civilization onto the ash heap of history.
History, the communists claimed, was on their side. To make sure of that, they imprisoned political dissenters en masse, starved their own people, directly killed millions more, and waged war on those who resisted around the world.
For a time, the United States was the only serious earthly counter to that threat. It was a symbol of hope for people living under the jackboot of fascism and communism.
Countless people abroad who live under the most direct threat of oppression understand what we stand for, at the most fundamental level.
Our own people should know that, too. Learning about communist tyranny and atrocities is a good place to start.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/12/florida-to-teach-students-about-evils-of-communism-some-on-the-left-arent-happy-about-it
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Striving for ‘Menstrual Equity,’ Oregon Puts Tampons in Men’s Bathrooms at Public Schools, Colleges
According to a new poll, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, is officially the least popular governor in America. And considering the law she just signed, it’s not hard to see why.
Thanks to the Menstrual Dignity Act that just passed, local taxpayers are now on the hook for thousands of new tampon dispensers in boys’ bathrooms. This latest madness, which affects every public school and college in the state, is expected to cost up to $400 a machine. And school custodians aren’t the only ones upset about it.
“This will show all of our youth, and especially our trans youth, that the bathroom they’re using, that affirms their gender, that it’s for them,” argued one Portland resident, “and it has the products there that they might need.”
Legislators agreed, expanding a bill that was originally intended to give female students free sanitary products at school. Now, in an absurd gesture, the state has decided to “affirm the right to menstrual dignity for transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and two-spirit students” by trying to “minimize negative attention that could put them at risk of harm … during menstruation.”
In the state’s guidance, school officials are told to use gender-neutral phrases like “menstruating students” instead of “girls.” When it comes to explaining the reproductive process, teachers are instructed to tell kids that “someone with a uterus and ovaries may begin to menstruate,” instead of girls. There’s no such thing as “female hygiene products,” the toolkit argues, only “menstrual products.”
Obviously, state leaders didn’t bother to consult their counterparts in Illinois, where a similar move has literally opened the floodgates to expensive plumbing issues and mischief. “When you give a grade-school boy something that’s adhesive, they’re going to put it in places,” Illinois Republicans argued during their debate.
“These products are not inexpensive, and they are going to be misused if they are placed in elementary school boys’ bathrooms,” Republican state Rep. Avery Bourne fumed last year.
Case in point: campuses like Loyola University, where janitors are dealing with all kinds of pranks, tampering, and vandalism. Sanitary pads “would end up on the mirrors, in the sinks, down the toilet, and completely thrown out,” one students group complained.
School administrators have also had to deal with the fallout of this lunacy in Illinois, admitting, “Operationally for our building, yes, it is creating problems … ” Huntley High Assistant Principal Tom Kempf said. “[T]he custodian has to spend an extra hour fixing something … ”
What’s next? Urinals in the girls’ restrooms?
“I’m telling you, there is no logic here,” Republican state Sen. Jil Tracy warned before the state ignored her and passed the bill. “We’ve got to quit playing these stupid silly games here and get real and get fiscally responsible.”
Unfortunately, “menstrual equity” is only scratching the surface of outrage in most states, where parents are fighting a much more sinister abuse of their authority. In Florida, mom January Littlejohn is actually suing her school district for helping her teenage daughter transition without her consent.
On “Fox & Friends,” she explained how she stumbled on a “transgender support plan” that school officials were working on behind Littlejohn’s back that included everything from preferred pronouns, overnight rooming situations for field trips, switching to boys’ restrooms, and other steps that they never called home to discuss.
“This is happening all over the nation,” Littlejohn warned. “This same protocol is in place in many, many schools across districts everywhere … So this is a very systematic way that parents are being excluded from important decisions occurring with their children—and, further, social transition is a medical intervention that schools are grossly unqualified to be taking these steps without parental involvement.”
Her attorney, Vernadette Broyles, pointed out that there’s a wave of lawsuits across the country from parents experiencing this same injustice. In places like Wisconsin, Maryland, Oregon, and California, she pointed out, moms and dads are starting to realize that “this is a national agenda … and they need to assert [their rights] with their school.”
President Joe Biden’s radical education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has been on the receiving end of a lot of angry letters from Republicans who see the president’s administration—and woke districts across the country—”withholding information from parents … at an alarming pace.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., were furious that a 12-year-old girl attempted suicide after the school pushed her to embrace her new gender identity “without notifying the parents.”
“There’s little to no accountability coming from this administration,” Foxx and Burr wrote to Cardona earlier this year. “How many more children will be put in harm’s way if school districts are not being held to account?”
In places like Missouri, state leaders are racing to keep this dangerous ideology at arm’s length. Right now, local conservatives are working against the clock to move a bill that would outlaw this radical gender therapy (including hormones and surgery) for children out of the Rules Committee and onto to the floor. So far, it’s been stalled by one man—the committee’s chairman, Republican state Rep. Philip Christofanelli
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/04/striving-for-menstrual-equity-oregon-puts-tampons-in-mens-bathrooms-at-public-schools-colleges
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Australia: Parents turned away as childcare centres don’t have enough staff
Queensland’s childcare industry is being crippled by worker shortages with many centres forced to turn parents away due to regulatory child and staff ratios.
The number of job vacancies in the early learning sector are at record highs across the country with one in 10 roles vacant nationally and 1371 in Queensland. Hiring difficulties are so dire fears grow that some centres will not survive and many have had to apply for a government waiver to legally operate as they have not enough staff.
The Australian Childcare Alliance in Queensland is deeply concerned by the job crisis and has been lobbying all parties in the lead up to the Federal Election to recognise the need for strategies to attract workers to the sector and in the long run keep more mothers, who need childcare, in the workplace.
“The workforce crisis in early childhood education has been on our radar for many years but this became even more of an issue during the pandemic when we had a significant number of educators leave our sector, either taking early retirement because they were simply exhausted, or due to vaccine mandates,” president of the ACA in Queensland Majella Fitzimmons said.
The ACA has been working with members on the most effective ways to find new staff.
“We highlight government programs for staff and businesses to support new entrants to the sector. There are some great packages and grants that bring new entrants to our sector and allow them to ‘earn while they learn’ through supported work placement programs,” Ms Fitzimmons said .
The early education peak body believes the government needs to look at reduced fees for qualifications in this field, and a boost in Skilled Visa Immigrants.
Lucy Schweizer Cook, general manager of a chain of Amaze early education centres across the state plus outside school hours care services, told The Courier-Mail that all but one of the Amaze centres are at capacity due to staff shortages.
“Parents are on waiting lists until we can meet the ratios to enrol more children. During Covid a lot of educators had a life reboot with many deciding they would stay home rather than work or looking for jobs with higher wages. We are doing all we can to make things more attractive for workers. We give loads of bonuses, pay four per cent above award wages, have staff childcare discount, flexibility, free uniform,” she said.
“It is such a rewarding career, who wouldn’t want hugs from babies and children every day,” she said.
Under The National Quality Framework there must be one educator for four children under 24 months in child care settings, two to three year olds require one staff member for five children and in outside school hours care and vacation care one educator for 15 children.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/parents-turned-away-as-childcare-centres-dont-have-enough-staff/news-story/54299fec1eec4ad3c6601e0bf8892833
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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13 May, 2022
Exposing the Left’s Destructive Education Agenda: They’re ‘Coming for Your Children’
Beginning with the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia—in which Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe for all practical purposes vowed to keep parents out of the classroom, saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”—parents began to realize the Democratic Party wanted to leave them behind.
President Joe Biden echoed that sentiment April 27 while speaking to a group of Teachers of the Year, when he told them: “They’re all our children. … They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”
Politics aside, the issue at hand is protecting our children from radical ideologies and preserving a parent’s right to be a parent. But the left wants to have a stranglehold on education, to keep parents on the sidelines, and to force them to co-parent with the government, while driving a wedge between parent and child.
When we push back on—and call out—those policies, its true motives are revealed.
To see that displayed firsthand, look no further than Florida, where a former House colleague, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a bill to reinforce parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children because parents should be able to send their first grader to school without worrying he or she will be taught radical sexual orientation and gender identity ideology.
The “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which Democrats and the LGBT lobby falsely dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill simply prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, prohibits classroom instruction that is not age-appropriate for students, and requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.
Florida’s new law exists to ensure parents’ rights and protect young children from being exposed to sexually explicit indoctrination, and contains nothing outside the realm of common sense, but the firestorm from the liberal media, Hollywood, leftists, and woke corporations like Disney (a company that profits from creating content for children) was astonishing.
Just as an aside: Why has Disney shifted from founder Walt Disney’s vision of providing family-friendly entertainment to essentially being the lobbying arm for the left’s LGBT agenda?
My question is: Do the opponents of the law really think children (ages 5 through 9) should receive sexually explicit instruction in school regarding sexual orientation and gender identity ideology and that parents should have no say in what goes on in the classroom?
If the answer is yes, then we really do have reason to be concerned.
Perhaps you remember the chilling lyrics of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ “parody” song that made waves last year: “You think that we’ll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked. Funny, just this once, you’re correct. We’ll convert your children—happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it. … We’re coming for your children. … The gay agenda is here.”
What’s scary is that the “coming for your children” song disguised as parody doesn’t seem as much of an outlier when you consider the left’s vitriolic reaction to the passage of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education law; a Disney executive producer’s admission of the company’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” released in a leaked video; the Biden administration’s push for mutilating “gender reassignment” surgeries and life-altering puberty blockers for minors; and the doxxing of the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account created to expose the degeneracy of predators and the horrors of the LGBT agenda by reposting content posted by the radicals themselves.
The truth is, the Biden White House, liberal media, woke corporations, and Democratic elites are playing politics at the expense of children’s lives and well-being. Unfortunately, this is nothing new, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Democrats and teachers unions forced young children out of the classroom to protect them from a disease that poses little or no risk for healthy young people and kids.
The number of children who have suffered mentally, physically, emotionally, and developmentally from the onslaught of these ineffective and unscientific COVID-19 policies is heartbreaking. But the left doesn’t seem to care.
From unscientific social isolation measures and unproven mask mandates in schools to exposure to sexually explicit material in the classroom and a pro-abortion agenda, children suffer the most from the woke ideologies of the radical Democratic elites.
We even see this with the Senate confirmation of federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Democrats—and some Republicans—hail her as a hero despite the fact that she has a long history of leniency in sentencing in child pornography cases. That should have raised a red flag on both sides of the aisle, not a speedy confirmation.
Where does it stop for progressives when it comes to promoting their radical ideologies? It doesn’t. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile, all at the expense of those who deserve the most protection.
The reality is this: Conservative policies are pro-child, pro-family, pro-parent, and most importantly, pro-life. Democrats, however, promote policies and ideologies that ultimately impair children in the long run, vilify concerned parents as “domestic terrorists,” and attack the most vulnerable.
Conservatives believe that parents, not the government, should have the primary say in their child’s life and that a child’s rights must be protected first and foremost. For conservatives, when it comes to protecting children, that is the hill to die on.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/11/exposing-the-lefts-destructive-education-agenda-theyre-coming-for-your-children/
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The NY Legislature’s hostage-taking on mayoral control of schools
With bare weeks left in the legislative session, state lawmakers are torturing Mayor Eric Adams by holding hostage the renewal of mayoral control of the city’s public schools, now set to expire June 30.
Chaos would ensue if the city actually had to re-establish the old Board of Education, potentially ousting Chancellor David Banks as the system’s boss and utterly derailing Adams’ and Banks’ efforts to repair the damage wrought in the de Blasio era, including all the ground lost during the pandemic.
It’s far more likely the Legislature will do an extension of two or three years, while also undermining mayoral control by adding new strings. The only winner will be the school unions (whose power grows as accountability is diffused) and the lawmakers eager to take Adams down a peg.
Meanwhile, it’s all just one more thing for parents to worry about. In a sane world, mayoral control would be permanent until lawmakers decided to replace it. But that would leave Albany powerbrokers less able to indulge themselves at the kids’ expense.
This, when the Adams-Banks agenda is so promising: Lose the woke ideology, support and expand the parts of the system that work (the test-in-only specialized high schools and Gifted & Talented programs), prune the bureaucracy and increase accountability, do more for kids with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and return to phonics as a proven method of teaching children how to read.
In a tell of who’s really calling the shots, Albany is aiming to demand smaller class sizes, requiring more teachers (the United Federation of Teachers’ perennial goal: more members) even as enrollment declines.
State Senate Education Committee chief Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) also wants to dilute City Hall’s influence on the Panel for Education Policy by adding another parent representative and making City Comptroller Brad Lander (a relentlessly pandering de Blasio-style progressive likely hostile to the interests of Liu’s own constituents) an ex officio member.
Mayor Adams held a rally with union leaders for mayoral accountability on the steps of City Hall on Monday, May 9.
Mayor Adams held a rally with union leaders for mayoral control on the steps of City Hall on Monday, May 9.
NYC Mayor's Office
Yes, Adams erred in failing to set up an effective Albany lobbying team, instead naively relying on the Legislature to simply do what’s right. As a former state senator, he should’ve known better. And relying on the weak reed of Gov. Kathy Hochul was another huge mistake.
But the major blame belongs at the door of Liu, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bx.) and others in the city’s Albany delegation whose first loyalty is clearly with the special interests, not the families they supposedly represent.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/12/ny-legislatures-obscene-hostage-taking-on-mayoral-control-of-schools/
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Australia: Seven surprising changes to the way Qld. children will be taught at school in 2023
Students will be taught about tax and superannuation, Australia’s women’s movement, domestic violence and how to “make active choices” as part of a curriculum overhaul being rolled out next year.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority on Tuesday unveiled its new “stripped back and teachable” curriculum coming in 2023.
Mathematics and STEM programs were given a vast overhaul while English and physical education programs will have sweeping changes.
A “Deep Time indigenous History” has been added to the curriculum as a compulsory component of Year 7.
The new curriculum will include the rollout of “making active choices” lessons in classrooms to probe Australian students to strategise how they can increase physical activity in their day-to-day lives as well as reduce sedentary behaviour.
The lessons around healthy choices regarding activity and inactivity will be introduced from Year 5 onwards.
The changes come off the back of alarming data in recent years by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which categorised 1 in 4 Aussie kids, 24 per cent, as being overweight or obese.
Here are seven surprising additions to the curriculum you may have missed.
Physical education
By the end of Year 1, students will have explored how to seek, give or deny permission respectfully when sharing possessions or personal space.
By the end of Year 8, students will examine how roles, levels of power and coercion and control within relationships can be influenced by gender stereotypes.
By the end of Year 10, students will have investigated how gender equality and challenging assumptions about gender can prevent violence and abuse in relationships.
History
By the end of Year 7, history students will understand more about the early First Nations Australians, their social organisation, cultural practices and their continuity and change over time.
By the end of Year 10, history students will have learnt about the significant events, individuals and groups in the women’s movement in Australia and how they have collectively changed the role and status of women.
Business and social science
By the end of Year 8, students will be taught about the importance of Australia’s taxation system and how it affects decision-making by individuals and businesses.
By the end of Year 10, students will have learnt about the importance of Australia’s superannuation system and how it affects consumer and financial decision-making.
Mathematics
Leading changes to mathematics and STEM, designed to prepare Aussie kids for the jobs of the future, was Year 1 students being taught to connect numbers to 20 – up from 10 – and order numbers 120, up from 100.
Percentages will also be introduced at Year 5 instead of Year 6 and line graphs will be taught in Year 5 science classes instead of Year 10.
But Year 1 kids will no longer learn to tell time on an analog clock, with fractions – including ‘time telling’ – pushed back to Year 2.
English
Under changes to the English components of the new curriculum, by the end of Year 10, students will no longer be required to “consolidate a personal handwriting style that is legible, fluent and automatic and supports writing for extended periods”.
By the end of Year 4, students will understand past, present and future tenses and their impact on meaning in a sentence.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/education-queensland/seven-surprising-changes-to-the-way-your-children-will-be-taught-at-school-in-2023/news-story/c936551616d0fd67f1a605e1c5844567
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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12 May, 2022
Proposal Aims to Bolster Student Privacy in California
At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, schools confronted new difficulties when they were tossed into remote learning due to prolonged lockdowns.
Resorting to online classes, schools relied on obtrusive software to proctor online tests. State Senator Dr. Richard Pan is recently advancing with a proposed revision to California’s Business and Professions Code relating to student privacy. The California Student Test Taker Privacy Protection Act aims to curb the invasive surveillance of remote students by their schools.
The proposal would direct schools to guarantee that their proctoring software minimizes unnecessary data collection of student information while also limiting the data’s retention and disclosure. Moreover, the Act gives students and their families the right to a private remedy if a proctoring software gathers data beyond what is needed to proctor the test.
Despite the slow return to in-person classes, online tests remain, but the pernicious software should not. Not only does the use of what is effectively malware constitute both an attack on privacy and a potential network safety risk, schools have overlooked better alternatives. Schools all too often did not adopt sensible and effective strategies like remote proctors that record the live screen sharings of students or turning off settings that show the correctness or incorrectness of answers. Instead, schools drove straight into invasive surveillance.
Some proctoring software monitors computer inputs, such as peripherals like monitors, mice, webcams, microphones, headphones, and USB, HDMI, DP, and Thunderbolt connections. Some access computer administrative controls, which opens up security vulnerabilities. Several proctoring services also possess and collect facial recognition and emotion detection, which scan other people in the environment. One vendor, which initially received notice for previous work with the Transportation Security Administration’s facial recognition efforts, uses an algorithm to monitor student behavior and categorize students as having high or low “integrity.”
Beyond privacy and security concerns, the wide net cast by proctoring software is also the cause of needless interruptions for both students and teachers. One student reported that crying during an exam activated the cheating eye tracker, saying, “My French prof had to watch 45 min[utes] of me quietly sobbing.” Another student was reported to be unable to take a math class because the sound of his laptop fans triggered the proctoring software.
https://blog.independent.org/2022/05/06/proposal-aims-to-bolster-student-privacy-in-california/?omhide=true
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Elementary school teachers brag about ignoring parents' requests to refer to their children by their given names and pronouns
Elementary school staffers bragged about outright ignoring parents' requests to refer to their children by their given names and pronouns late last month, during a virtual panel that saw speakers refer to parents as 'caregivers.'
The virtual 'Creating and Sustaining GSAs in Elementary Schools' meeting, held over Zoom April 26, saw moderator Katy Butler, a second grade public school teacher at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in San Francisco, poise a question to her fellow panelists concerning pronoun use when it comes to their students.
The inquiry, sent to the group by another, unnamed educator, asked advice on how to deal with parents peeved over teachers' pronoun use.
‘What should we do if a parent requests that we refer to their child by the pronouns associated with their sex assigned at birth instead of their preferred pronouns, and that we use a legal name instead of a student’s chosen name?' Butler - who panel organizers billed as a white queer cisgender female teacher on social media - read.
Butler - the creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms, the group that organized the panel - then gave way for the three other panelists, staffers at public schools across the country, to weigh in on the matter.
One panelist, fellow cocreator Kieran Slattery, a fifth grade teacher in Massachusetts, proceeded to provide his advice on the matter - proudly revealing instances where he ignored parents' requests to call their child by certain pronouns.
‘So, I can respond with something that I’ve done,’ Slattery, who teaches at Jackson Street Elementary, began.
‘This came up for me - it’s come up in a couple different ways - but it’s come up for me where caregivers asked.'
Slattery said: ‘I actually refer to their child’s name… using the name the name they asked to be referred to and their chosen pronouns, and caregivers reacted very strongly.'
The teacher then detailed how parents 'followed up with me and the principal, and said, like, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”’
Slattery - who panel organizers billed as a 'white, queer transgender man' - proceeded to warn the three other panelists of the legal concerns that come with rejecting parents' requests on how they refer to their children.
‘So the laws in every state are different, obviously, and I can’t speak to the laws in everyone’s particular state, but I will say - again, the resources that we’ll give you after this have some helpful sites where you can look up what the rules are for your state,' the Northampton elementary school teacher said.
'Before I responded to the caregiver, I made sure I ran it by my principal and my superintendent just to make sure that they had my back.'
The transgender teacher then revealed how he rejected the request of one pair of parents - or as he called them, 'caregivers' - touting the slight as a victory.
'And then I responded - and I chose my words carefully - and I said, “I hear you, I hear what you’re saying," Slattery said, adding that, 'I tried to really affirm what the caregiver was asking me, like in terms of, “I hear you saying that you’re feeling uncomfortable with me using the child’s preferred name and pronouns; I hear that you’re using different ones at home.'
He continued: 'But here at school, the expectation is that all of my students feel comfortable and welcome in my classroom.’
The assertion saw the educator put particular emphasis on the word 'my.'
‘So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with,' Slattery then said, with his fellow panelists nodding in approval.
The teacher went on to equate conveying that concept to parents to teaching children in his classroom.
‘Just have that be it,' he said - 'almost like the guidelines I try to use when I’m, like, explaining hard topics to my students. Like, less is more.'
The other panelists again nodded in approval.
Slattery continued: ‘I just say, like, “That sounds like it works really well for you at home, and you can absolutely choose to do whatever you like at home.
'In my classroom – and I even say, like, every year I start out my year by sending home information to caregivers that says, like, “Just so you know, this is an affirming class – the way that I affirm students is I call them by the names they ask to be called by and use their correct pronouns.'
The teacher then reiterated how he denied the parents' request.
'I just told them – maybe that’s not helpful – I just told them, “No,”' seemingly conceding the contentious nature of his assertion.
‘Respectfully, no.’
The assertion again garnered more impassioned nods from the other panelists.
'And because I had my principal and my superintendent’s support, there wasn't much they can do,' Slattery then said.
'And they eventually, kind of like, found another topic to squawk about,’ he added, before letting out a laugh.
‘And they left that alone.’
The remaining panelists all seemed to agree with the educator's assertion, with Butler in particular nodding affirmatively throughout her contemporary's spiel.
Another panelist, 5th grade Spanish teacher Daniel Alonso, echoed Slattery's sentiments, describing a similar incident between him and a set of parents at Chavez Elementary in Yonkers, New York.
‘Similarly to what Kieran said,' said Alonso, referring to Slattery, 'in my school district, LGBTQ+ students have a bill of rights - and the fourth one is that they have the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and a name that fits their gender identity.
‘And so, similarly, there was a situation where a parent felt that the school was not doing what they wanted them to do, and we – I don’t even know if we were respectful about it – we were just like, “No, sorry. Like, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you,”' he said, while offering a smug smile.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10806755/Teachers-reveal-ignore-parents-requests-use-childrens-given-names-pronouns.html
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Confusion about Australia's Anglican [Episcopal] schools
In what sense is an Anglican school that rejects Anglican teaching in order to keep non-Anglican families happy still an Anglican school?
That’s the question Sydney Anglicans are wrestling with as opposition to Christian teaching on sexuality and gender grows.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported at the weekend that alumni and parents from Anglican schools had issued a letter complaining the Anglican church was ‘imposing its social conservatism on classrooms’.
In other words, they were worried that the Anglican church was instructing Anglican schools to be, well, Anglican.
Specifically, parents were upset about guidelines for schools on dealing with students struggling with gender identity.
The Anglican Diocese of Sydney has advised its schools to show compassion, reject bullying and abuse, and note that nobody was immune from ‘brokenness’, but to also tell students to ‘honour and preserve the maleness or femaleness of the body God has given you’.
All of which sounded a little too much like Anglicanism for Anglican school parents.
‘I feel awful for any student who has to endure this senseless attack on their identity,’ a transgender woman (who identified as an Anglican parishioner) told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Another parent told the Herald that most families at his daughter’s Anglican school were not religious, and that he worried ‘socially conservative’ forces were pushing the school ‘in a different direction’.
By ‘socially conservative’ he presumably meant Anglican. And by ‘different direction’ he evidently meant Christian.
If only those Anglicans wouldn’t be so Anglican, their Anglican school would be less Anglican so that non-Anglicans could enjoy it!
Judging by the reported comments of disaffected parents, it will likely come as a surprise for them to learn that Anglican leaders don’t take their cues from Libs of TikTok.
Church leaders base their doctrine on the teaching of Jesus who, among other things, told his followers: ‘Surely you have read in the Scriptures: When God made the world, He made them male and female.’
Jesus’ words align with science, but not with the new-fangled gender transformation fetish.
The Anglican Diocese has essentially reminded its Anglican schools – which include some of the most exclusive colleges in the country such as The Kings School and Abbotsleigh – that they are Anglican.
Sydney Archbishop Kanishka Raffel said the guidelines:
‘Emphasise care and compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria and give schools wide discretion to respond to individual situations while holding to a Christian view of the inherent goodness of our bodies, as each has been created by God.’
But parents are threatening to withhold fees if the guidelines – including that school principals and board members must endorse the Christian view of marriage – are not rescinded.
A gay parent whose daughter attends St Catherine’s asked: ‘How do you explain to a girl that the leader of your school is opposed to your way of being?’
Imagine his surprise when he discovers there are literally hundreds of state schools in Sydney that endorse LGBTQ+ ways of being. And his daughter can attend any of them for free!
Upset non-Anglican parents don’t want their children to go to non-Anglican schools. But nor do they want their children’s Anglican schools to be Anglican.
So they are determined to leave their children in Anglican schools where they will oppose Anglicanism until the Anglican school is Anglican in name only such that it becomes a non-Anglican Anglican school.
The angry parents have found some support among senior school staff.
One Anglican school principal was said to be ‘livid’ at being asked to endorse the Christian view of marriage.
Others said the requirement would reduce the already small pool of potential candidates for principals and compromise the quality of school leadership.
A ‘high achieving woman with a public profile’ reportedly withdrew from the board of an exclusive Anglican school rather than sign a statement of faith endorsing the biblical view of marriage.
The Herald reported this as a problem. I suspect the Sydney Anglican Diocese may view it differently. The statement of faith had the intended effect of weeding out a board member not committed to Anglican doctrine.
The woman told the Herald: ‘It’s going to limit new principals – you’ll end up with a whole set of socially engineered principals across Anglican schools in the Sydney diocese.’
If by ‘socially engineered principals’ she means Bible-believing Christians (can there be any other kind?) then she is right. And the Sydney Anglican Diocese, along with Anglican parents who sent their children to Anglican schools because they are Anglican, will be delighted.
The woman continued: ‘Restrictive ideas about sexuality should not be tied up in the statement of faith and the fact that they are speaks to something deeply concerning about the Sydney Anglican Church right now. To me, this is not Christ-like.’
I imagine Christ, who taught that marriage was between a man and a woman, would be greatly amused to hear that He is not Christ-like.
The Sydney Anglican Diocese is not laughing.
After all, what is an Anglican school if it is no longer Anglican? What value are grand sandstone buildings if they sit on nothing but cultural quicksand?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/waiter-can-i-get-some-more-anglican-in-this-activism/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 May, 2022
Biden Says Kids Belong to Their Teachers
Schools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents’ values. It’s what the teachers unions intend.
Amazingly, that’s just fine with President Joe Biden, who told a gathering of teachers and union bigwigs on April 27 that the kids are “yours when they’re in the classroom.” That wasn’t just a Biden stumble. He repeated it for emphasis: “They are all our children …. They are not somebody else’s children.”
Sorry, Joe. But parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, and to set limits. State legislators in at least 12 states have introduced bills requiring teachers to post teaching materials, including books and videos, on a website for parents to inspect before their kids see them.
Good teachers will have no problem with that. But ideologically driven teachers, as well as the unions, are fighting back. That includes Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. As she launched Teacher Appreciation Week—and most teachers do deserve our appreciation—Weingarten smeared classroom transparency requests as the work of political “extremists.”
Concerned parents are not political extremists, but Biden is joining the attack against transparency, parroting the unions. He and most Democrats in Congress are teachers union flunkies. Democrats delivered hundreds of billions in COVID relief to school districts, including $46 billion to teach critical race theory. By the way, that included $9 billion for CRT in New York schools.
Biden also kowtowed to the unions to prolong school closings and masking, and then allowed the unions to dictate what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would require to reopen schools.
As a candidate, Biden vowed to end federal support for charter schools, and his new regulations have that obvious intent—another obsequious gesture to the unions.
Weingarten and National Education Association President Rebecca Pringle probably have more power in the Biden administration than any senator or cabinet member. That would be fine if they were wielding their clout to ensure children acquire strong reading and math skills. But that’s not their agenda.
The American Federation of Teachers website shows the union is more committed to political activism than reading and STEM instruction. The site urges visitors to “take action” on student debt, voting rights and passing the Equality Act. But it never mentions that fewer than half of New York City’s third to eighth graders can read at grade level. Or that, overall, students in the U.S. rank behind many other countries in math. No call to action there.
The AFT website also declares that the U.S. is facing health, economic and racial challenges “all made worse because of Donald Trump.” How can the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 entrust their children’s education to an organization so politically biased?
Joining the unions to fight a parent’s right to know is none other than the Democratic Party. No surprise. The unions give 94 percent of their money to Democratic candidates and parties, according to data-tracking nonprofit Open Secrets.
Tit for tat. Democrats are demonizing Republicans who support curriculum transparency. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) calls them “mean, hateful and spiteful.” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. says Republicans will be forced “to own the meanness.” Meanness for what? Keeping discussions of sex out of elementary school classrooms?
Murphy lamely predicts Republicans backing curriculum transparency will lose because “it’s just not true that it’s popular to pick on gay kids. That’s a willful distortion.
Truth is, no one advocates bullying gay kids. All children deserve kindness. But that doesn’t mean kindergarteners should be instructed in how boys can transition to become girls, or vice versa. Nearly half of teachers agree these issues don’t belong in the classroom, according to an Education Week poll.
Biden often jokes that he sleeps with a teachers union member—the same one—every night: First Lady Jill Biden. Cute, but he shouldn’t sell out to the rest. Parents care more than anyone else about their own children. They should decide what schools teach, not the far-left ideologues running the teachers unions.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-says-kids-belong-to-their-teachers_4448166.html
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Men Drop Out of College But the Gender Pay Gap Persists
The Wall Street Journal reports that three-fourths of the pandemic-driven college dropouts in the United States were men. These numbers would seem to depict a crisis for men that predicts lower future earning power. If the earnings for men are going down, does that mean the gender wage gap will close? For many reasons, the answer appears to be no. Kevin Carey of the New York Times explains some of the reasons why the gender wage gap persists -and why men in the United States, in general, are not in a pandemic-driven education crisis:
The gender imbalance in college enrollment and graduation is not new. Carey notes that women’s enrollment in college surged during the 1970s, but “women have outnumbered men on campus since the late 1970s. . . . The numbers haven’t changed much in recent decades.”
Male enrollment in public and private nonprofit four-year colleges dropped more from 2018 to 2019-before the pandemic-than from 2019 to 2020.
The raw numbers do not take into account that some college degrees are worth more than others. For example, men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries.
There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college degrees, but there are relatively few for women. Many female-dominated jobs don’t pay well. As women overcome obstacles and move into male-dominated fields, the pay usually goes down in those fields.
Data reflects a class difference: students from higher socioeconomic classes are less likely to drop out of college.
Last year, women were less likely than men to leave community college despite their disproportionate responsibility for caregiving and domestic work during the pandemic.
There is structural admissions discrimination by selective colleges that do not want a gender imbalance in their enrollment. While women apply to colleges in larger numbers than men, their applications are often rejected to maintain a gender balance. Carey cites a dean of admissions at Kenyon College as saying, “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”
Carey points out that the gender pay gap has been persistent despite the higher levels of enrollment and graduation from college by women for decades. Obviously, the problem is not just about whether or not you have a college degree. The problem is about societal attitudes about work and family, discriminatory policies and procedures that limit women’s access, and the lack of affordable childcare.
Just today, my cousin called to tell me how surprised she was when a woman plumber showed up at her door today to fix a plumbing problem in her house. The fact that it is still so unusual to see a woman plumber says a lot about what we consider “women’s work” versus “men’s work.” We still have a long way to go to even this playing field.
https://annelitwinphd.medium.com/men-drop-out-of-college-but-the-gender-pay-gap-persists-73eca8f2d645
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Texas Governor Calls for School Choice for Every Child in Lone Star State
The image of Lucy yanking away the football from Charlie Brown has been invoked for years as a metaphor for Texas’ relationship with school choice.
But is the Lone Star State finally about to connect?
On Monday night, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on the Legislature to allow education dollars to follow children to learning options of their parents’ choice, including to private schools.
“Empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school, or private school with state funding following the student,” the governor said, adding that school choice “is going to give all Texas children a better chance to succeed.”
Abbott’s leadership on this important issue is a major, positive step for educational freedom in Texas. The state’s policymakers should now heed the call and establish universal education savings accounts for all Texas children.
Every child should have the opportunity for a great K-12 experience—and the chance to succeed in school and in life. Education savings accounts can offer this on-demand education experience for children from all walks of life.
The governor’s proposal has come at the right time.
Parents are already signaling that assigned public schools are not meeting their children’s needs. Like state and school district officials around the country, the Texas Education Agency reported a marked decrease in public school enrollment statewide during the 2020-2021 school year.
Curiously, while some districts, such as Fort Worth, are reporting historic enrollment decreases, others, such as Liberty Hill, northwest of Austin, saw sharp increases as families moved to more popular areas within the state.
At the same time, the Texas Homeschool Coalition reports that the number of homeschooling families increased by almost 300% in 2021. That means Texans are watching a shift in how and where families choose to live and raise their families.
Providing more education options to families couldn’t come a moment too soon. Just one-quarter of Texas eighth graders are proficient in reading, significantly lower than the national average.
Among black and Hispanic students, the percentages who can read proficiently drops to 11% and 19%, respectively.
Currently, fewer Texas students can read proficiently than could do so in the late 1990s. Mathematics outcomes don’t fare any better.
Where district schooling has failed, education choice holds promise.
Education choice improves academic achievement and attainment, increases access to safe schools, has positive fiscal effects, improves civic outcomes, and, critically, enables families to select learning environments that align with their values.
It should come as no surprise, then, that school choice also increases parental satisfaction.
The small but disproportionately vocal minority that still opposes education freedom in Texas is largely confined to the halls of the Texas Education Association, the state teachers union.
Unions are out of step with Texas families, 74% of whom support education savings accounts. With an account, the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state K-12 formula in a private account that parents use to buy education products and services.
These accounts allow families to customize their child’s education by selecting textbooks and personal tutors, paying for private school tuition if they choose, and even saving money from year to year, to name just a few options.
In fact, research from North Carolina found that more than 60% of participating families are using an account to access more than one learning option at the same time.
For some parents and students, they may want a private school that aligns with their personal beliefs. Others may need an education therapist and individualized technology to help a child with special needs.
Families across Arizona and Florida, along with children in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, are using the accounts, and lawmakers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Indiana have approved proposals in recent years to create similar account options.
Some have argued that school choice would be difficult for families living in rural areas of Texas. Yet, those concerns are overblown. Nearly 70% of Americans living in rural areas have a private school within 10 miles of their home, and 34% of those families have a private school within 5 miles of their home.
Furthermore, supply is sure to meet demand once families can control their share of education funding. New schools will spring up and existing private schools may add additional campuses.
Other claims that parents will misspend money have also been debunked by research. In Arizona, an auditor general’s report found that misspending amounted to just 1% of account funds—and some of this misspending was attributed to the state Department of Education’s poor guidance for families on allowable expenses.
Officials in other states, such as North Carolina, have adopted new tools to help prevent inappropriate spending before it takes place.
Texas is a popular destination for families looking to move, and state education trends are shifting. State officials should follow the governor’s lead and make Texas a popular destination not just for families looking for a new home, but also for more quality learning options.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/09/texas-governor-calls-for-school-choice-for-every-child-in-lone-star-state
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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10 May, 2022
Kids’ book ‘Our Skin’ in NYC schools blames racism on white people
In a world gone mad, elites keep peddling untruths
An “inflammatory” children’s book being distributed to New York City schools teaches kids as young as 2 that the concept of race was created by white people who claimed they were “better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else.”
The book “Our Skin” was penned by Harlem activist Megan Madison and Brooklynite and library worker Jessica Ralli, and published last year. It begins with a simple discussion of skin tones — then launches into a screed that blames the idea of race on white people along with an illustration of scary-looking human skulls encased in glass and sitting on shelves.
“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares.
It goes on to say “That isn’t true or fair at all!” with a picture of a “Caucasian” man holding up the “Most beautiful skull.”
The book, aimed at those ages 2 to 5, has been distributed to at least one Manhattan kindergarten, one on Staten Island as well as a school in Brooklyn and appears to be part of the Department of Education’s new “Universal Mosaic Curriculum.” The DOE announced the plan under former Mayor de Blasio to standardize instructional materials and “better reflect” the system’s demographics. It is to begin in 2023.
The tome is on a suggested reading list parents can access through the website TeachingBooks. It is part of the “Universal Mosaic Independent Reading Collections” for kindergartners created by the DOE’s Library Services, the site says.
Brooklyn parent leader Vito LaBella called the text “inflammatory.”
“That page alone in my mind is just preaching hate,” he said, referring to the text about sorting people by skin color.
LaBella said at least one school in southwest Brooklyn’s District 20, where he’s a member of the Community Education Council, received the books. The principal had been told by former Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter they would be coming. They were to be delivered to kindergarten classes, but the principal was holding off, he added.
“There were no instructions or curriculum guide with them,” said LaBella, who is seeking the Republican nod to challenge state Sen. Andrew Gounardes.
He said he planned to discuss his concerns about the book at Wednesday’s CEC meeting.
A Manhattan parent of a kindergartener saw the book in his son’s school this week in a box marked “Mosaic curriculum.”
The dad said he looked through the book and stopped cold at the page saying white people invented race.
“The book itself is fine and a lot of what is said in the book is productive and I think very helpful in a discussion of race,” he said. “However, there’s just an excerpt from it that I think is so damaging that it should disqualify the whole book.”
He said he would address his concerns with the principal.
“Racism should be talked about, but it should be talked about correctly,” he said. “I think that telling 5- and 6-year-olds that white people are all responsible for all racism is not helpful. It’s going to be very traumatic for many 5- and 6-year-olds who are going to blame themselves and blame their parents.”
The book’s narrative adds that “racism is also the things people do and the unfair rules they make about race so that white people get more power.”
There is no discussion that groups other than whites might be racist.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/07/kids-book-our-skin-in-nyc-schools-blames-racism-on-whites/
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The Left Finally Admits Remote Learning Was a Total Failure
A newsletter from The New York Times breaks down the disastrous effects school closures had on kids during the pandemic sparked by the Wuhan coronavirus.
When news of the virus first broke, schools were ultimately the first to close. And they tayed closed for nearly two years, causing kids to fall behind educationally and socially.
According to a Harvard study, students lost on average the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning between 2020 and 2021.
Even kids who went back to school in 2021 still lost about 20 percent of their typical math curriculum learning.
Ultimately, the research found remote learning was the primary driver for these learning gaps. Evidence suggests that these problems were completely preventable.
It is clear remote learning did more harm than good.
Additionally, the article notes that many administrators could have recognized this as early as the fall of 2020.
Fast forward to what we know now, children are at a very low risk of severe illness or death caused by the Wuhan coronavirus. Studies also show that in-school transmission between kids is extremely rare.
According to The New York Times, the schools that did re-open early on did not see a substantial spread compared to schools that remained closed.
An interesting take to point out is that low-poverty schools (many of which are run by Democratic officials) stayed closed longer than in Republican-run states. Evidence shows this is because Democrat-run districts were more likely to have unionized teachers advocating for remote learning.
Research indicates that children in schools who did re-open earlier rather than later, thrived in and out of the classroom.
Furthermore, two years of disruption from a normal routine, from being around peers, and from engaging with other kids proved to be catastrophic. The road to recovery for children’s social, mental and learning capabilities may difficult.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/05/06/the-left-finally-admits-remote-learning-was-a-total-failure-n2606891
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Australian PM says schools not expelling gay students, doubles down on religious discrimination act
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says gay students are not being expelled from religious schools, doubling down on re-introducing the failed religious discrimination act (RDA) without extra protections for gay and transgender students.
The government attempted to pass the legislation earlier this year but shelved it after five of its own MPs crossed the floor to vote with Labor and the crossbench on amendments that bolstered the sex discrimination act (SDA) to give transgender students extra protections.
Mr Morrison had promised extra protections for gay students to accompany his religious discrimination bill but has since walked back from the pledge.
Today he said if the Coalition won government, he would introduce the religious discrimination act on its own and amend the sex discrimination act "sequentially".
"We've been having this conversation for about the last four years, and on each occasion it has been presented that apparently students are being expelled each and every day, each and every week, or each and every year," Mr Morrison said.
PM remains firm over religious discrimination bill
The Prime Minister says a re-elected Coalition government would push ahead with its long-promised religious discrimination law without making changes to protect LGBTQI children at the same time.
"There is no evidence [of that] because the religious schools themselves don't wish to do that. They don't wish to do it. This is an issue that is actually not occurring in these schools."
When pressed to reveal how much time there would be between the two bills, Mr Morrison would not specify. "They are different issues and that is my view," he said. "They're both important issues and the government's position is they'll be dealt with sequentially."
Earlier this year, just before the legislation was introduced to parliament, a Brisbane school was criticised for sending a letter to parents demanding they sign a contract affirming students identify as their birth gender and that homosexuality was "sinful".
The contract was withdrawn a few days later after backlash from parents and the wider community.
At the time, the Prime Minister said he did not support the controversial contract and reiterated his promise to protect gay children from discrimination.
Moderate Liberals want the government to pursue the religious discrimination act and changes to the sex discrimination act at the same time to protect vulnerable students.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese today pointed to a letter in which Mr Morrison promised to protect gay students at the same time. "I'm astonished he has walked away from that," Mr Albanese said. "We need to protect people from discrimination, whether its religious discrimination or on the basis of sexuality.
"If people don't think some young people are discriminated against and vilified, then that just does not reflect reality."
While being questioned by journalists today, Mr Morrison took aim at Labor for not supporting the legislation in its original form, rather than admitting his own party was split on the issue.
"I'm quite determined," Mr Morrison said. "People have learnt that about me. I don't give up on things. "I had hoped to pursue these issues in a bipartisan way. I'd very much hoped to do that. "But the issue was hijacked and the outcome was thwarted … it was hijacked by the Labor Party and the crossbench."
The Prime Minister was asked if he thought the moderate Liberal MPs who crossed the floor had changed their minds, or if he had written them off because they were under threat in their seats from independents and Labor.
"The issues that they were addressing were not related to the religious discrimination act; they were related to the sexual discrimination act, and we should be able to see those, we should be able to pursue them sequentially, as we set out," Mr Morrison said. "That's the government's policy. There's no change to the government's view here."
Moderate Liberal MP Katie Allen, who was one of the five Liberals who crossed the floor earlier this year, today would not rule out doing the same again, if there was no protection for gay and transgender students. "I will be very clear: I have a very strong view on this and I will not be changing my position," she said. "I believe that you can protect religious freedom and protect gay and trans students at the same time."
"That's the thing about political negotiations, it is always a negotiation and I will stick with my position, because I believe in the protection of gay and trans students."
Federal Labor supports new religious discrimination laws but Mr Albanese has not given a specific time frame for any accompanying protections for gay and transgender students.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-08/scott-morrison-says-schools-not-expelling-gay-students/101047808
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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9 May, 2022
UK: Oxbridge discriminating against grammar schools 'could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic pupils', warns education thinktank
<i> Grammar schools are State-funded selective schools<.i>
Britain's leading universities have been warned not to discriminate against grammar schools as it could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic youngsters.
The warning comes after the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Professor Stephen Toope, faced accusations of ‘social engineering’ for saying that enrolling more grammar school pupils would not help to widen ‘participation goals’.
Canadian-born Professor Toope told the Times Education Commission: ‘We have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people from independent schools.’
Now, the head of a respected think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), has waded into the row. Research from HEPI has shown that grammar schools send more ethnic minorities students to Cambridge than all other state schools in the country combined.
It also indicated that children from the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of households are more than twice as likely to get an Oxbridge place if they live in an area with grammar schools.
HEPI’s chairman, Nick Hillman, said: ‘If Oxbridge sets limits on grammar school recruitment, we may see the number of UK students with minority ethnic backgrounds drop.’
Dr Mark Fenton, chief executive of the Grammar School Heads Association, said: ‘Professor Toope should also be aware that in counties with a wholly selective system, virtually all the most academic students attend selective schools regardless of social background. If Cambridge was to reduce admissions from grammar schools, this would be manifestly unfair on large swathes of the country.’
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said: ‘Grammar schools are a valuable part of our system, and universities must have a fair, transparent application process. Discriminating against a child because of their background or which school they went to is never acceptable.’
Mr Zahawi added: ‘I am proud we have more 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds at university than ever before and I want a system that continues to equip those students with the skills and knowledge they need to progress, whether to a top-tier university, an apprenticeship or the world of work.’
A Cambridge University spokesman said: ‘We do not discriminate against any applicant. If society is serious about offering opportunities to everyone, universities like ours need to reach beyond traditional recruiting grounds to very talented pupils who wouldn’t necessarily have considered applying.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10793175/Thinktank-Oxbridge-discriminating-against-grammar-schools-unfairly-impact-black-pupils.html
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Adams, Banks face a huge task in forcing NYC schools to focus on teaching all kids to read
Reading is fundamental — or so you might think. But, as The Post’s Cayla Bamberger reported last week, parents and education advocates across the city are demanding that the Department of Education do more to help all students learn how to read.
In 2019 (the last full pre-COVID school year), less than half of all Grades 3-8 students were proficient in reading. Then the debacle of remote learning set back all kids, leaving Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks a lot of damage to undo.
Adams’ own struggle with long-undiagnosed dyslexia informs his approach: His budget plan earmarks $7.4 million for dyslexia screening and support programs, plus launching two new schools for students with reading disabilities in Harlem and The Bronx.
Banks, meanwhile, wants to rethink the DOE’s approach to literacy by stressing phonics at an earlier age. That’s a huge win for kids and common sense over the ideologues who dominate the education establishment.
Sadly, that includes the State Education Department and Board of Regents, who in recent years have focused on dropping standards across the board to conceal rather than heal the system’s failings. That’s produced rising high-school graduation rates even as remote learning left all too many kids actually learning far less.
The SED’s new “alternative pathways to graduation” serve to confer diplomas on functional illiterates. Teens (especially ones with learning disabilities) get steered into paths where the system doesn’t have to address their problems learning to read.
Since they’re disproportionately minority kids, it’s a kind of racial segregation — the very sort of “inequity” that such progressives supposedly despise.
Adams is spot-on when he laments that the DOE’s $37 billion a year in taxpayer money isn’t buying a whole lot of learning success for the great majority of city students, especially black and Hispanic ones, who don’t perform at grade level in reading or math.
There’s no greater social-justice cause than helping poor and minority students learn to read. It’s a shame the mayor and chancellor need to fight not only the DOE’s inertia and the misbegotten policies of the last mayor but also the state education authorities as well as the ideologues and special interests who’d rather cover up the injustice than truly confront it.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/08/nyc-schools-face-a-huge-task-by-teaching-all-kids-to-read/
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Australia: Activists masquerading as educators
The recent news from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) that fewer and fewer students are choosing to study higher mathematics at Secondary school is yet another black mark against our education system.
Unfortunately, things are hardly better in Literature.
Victoria, which leads the way in progressive education, has seen students ditching literature in their droves. Over the last three years, the subject has dropped outside of the top 20 VCE subjects, with students preferring to study arguably less useful subjects such as ‘Food and Technology’ and ‘Media’.
This isn’t surprising given that the VCE’s booklist for literature in 2022 is heavily weighted toward modern texts that reveal a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with Marxism, Identity Politics, and Critical Race Theory. One-third of all texts on offer were published within the last 20 years, neglecting the remaining 5,000 years’ worth of literary history.
Students should be reading books by world-renowned authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. Instead, they are reading about ‘power, gender, and obsession’ in Jeanette Winterson’s racy novel The Passion. Oscar Wilde is overlooked in favour of Shelagh Delaney’s exploration of ‘sexuality, homophobia, and racism’ in her production A Taste of Honey. Then there is Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home from the Wars that challenges ‘binary understandings of power’. Books like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which plumbs the depths of the human condition, have been replaced with Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise denouncing the ‘abuses of capitalism’.
When great books manage to make the cut, they are taught through an ideological lens. For instance, students studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will look at the ‘obsessions of Georgian England’ and the ‘emergence of consumer culture’. In Tim Winton’s non-fiction work The Boy Behind the Curtain, ‘colonisation, capitalism, and politics’ are emphasised as key themes alongside ‘masculinity, gender, and family’.
Literature should not be used to send a political message to students. When learning is replaced with ideology, it undermines education. The study of literature should be about teaching students to think critically, not indoctrinating them with a progressive worldview.
Australian literature is notably absent from the 2022 VCE booklist.
While one-third of the texts were written by Australians, only half were actually set in Australia and the majority of these were poems. This reflects a dubious trend in education in which the idea of a global identity is promoted while the idea of an Australian identity is actively questioned.
Students should be reading classics like The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, or one of Banjo Paterson’s famous poems. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which looks at the birth of a distinctly Australian identity in the lead-up to Federation, also deserves to be on the list. Even films such as Ladies in Black are of value because they address the rich cultural impact of immigration from Europe in the wake of the second world war. These works are all listed on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australian Cannon and are classic pieces of literature that construct a vivid picture of the Australian way of life.
The problem is far greater than the booklist itself. Activists masquerading as educators have infiltrated Australian schools. They have successfully been destroying the pre-existing model of education and imposing their own. The choice of texts in this year’s booklist for Victorian students is an undisguised exercise in social engineering which robs students of their cultural heritage.
Victorians are being sold short.
Students from Queensland and New South Wales will read many of the great books missing from Victoria’s VCE program. For instance, the QCE literature booklist offers texts like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Queensland students have a much broader range of top-quality works that does not include pointed summaries pushing a progressive agenda like in Victoria. The New South Wales HSC English program, which also involves the study of literature, looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Short Stories by Henry Lawson, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This comes after a concerted effort in New South Wales to overhaul the Year 11 and 12 English syllabuses to include more ‘classic’ texts in 2017.
The solution for Victoria is simple. Give students the opportunity to read works of substance that look at the universal human experience rather than focusing solely on the issues faced by minority groups. More students would study literature if more classics with relatable life lessons were on the booklist, as is the case in New South Wales and Queensland.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/activists-masquerading-as-educators/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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8 May, 2022
How Randi Weingarten is actually undermining trust in public schools
In Randi Weingarten’s florid telling, far-right activists are resorting to unchecked propaganda and “Big Lies” to mislead parents, undermine trust in teachers and financially cripple public schools in hope of replacing them with a universal, unregulated voucher system. In a breathless essay for Time magazine, Weingarten, head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, blames “dark money-funded extremists” for an orchestrated campaign to weaken public education, “undermining our democracy and further eroding America’s middle class.”
In New York, we call this chutzpah.
American Federation of Teachers chief Weingarten has ample reason to be concerned about the decline in trust in America’s public schools, which have lost more than 1 million students in the past two years. But no one bears greater responsibility for that hemorrhage than Weingarten herself.
My AEI colleague Nat Malkus just released an exhaustive set of student-enrollment data covering the vast majority of US public-school systems. It shows that nearly 1.2 million children exited public-school systems in the 2020-21 school year, including more than 80,000 in New York City.
This year some districts recovered while others continued to shrink. The difference was not due to a right-wing campaign to undermine public schools, as Weingarten claims. It was how those districts responded to COVID.
Districts that returned to in-person instruction more quickly have seen enrollment recover; those that stayed remote the longest continued to lose students. “I thought we’d see a relationship with in-person learning, but I didn’t think it would be this strong,” Malkus notes.
If Weingarten wants to talk “Big Lies,” there’s none bigger than her own bald-faced lie, repeated endlessly in interviews and on social media, that she “worked to reopen schools safely since April 2020.”
Never mind that the union’s affiliate in Washington, DC (enrollment down 4% since the 2019-20 school year), held a sickout strike to stop schools from reopening. Never mind that the AFT’s affiliate in Chicago (down 7%) claimed demands to reopen schools were “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Never mind that the union in Los Angeles (down 9%) insisted “reopening safely” included union demands for a moratorium on charter schools, wealth taxes and Medicare for All.
Never mind that Weingarten noisily insisted that she wanted kids back in school even while lobbying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention behind the scenes to slow-walk a return to full-time, in-person instruction.
The full cost of this calamity is becoming clear. A Harvard study released Thursday concluded that shifts to remote or “hybrid” instruction during 2020-21 had “profound consequences for student achievement,” especially for those attending high-poverty schools, where they were “a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.” The report ominously concluded: “If the achievement losses become permanent, there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality, especially in states where remote instruction was common.”
I’m not unsympathetic to Weingarten calling out the rhetorical excesses of conservative activists and culture warriors. But she’s doing public education and teachers no favors with her refusal to take parent discontent over critical race theory and gender ideology in schools seriously, attributing it to disinformation and saying almost blithely that “this is how wars start.”
Her new “Big Lie” is painting a picture of parents as mere dupes of extremists and ideologues, which she claimed in a recent interview is a “base vote strategy” by Republicans.
Weingarten is either misreading the moment or in deep denial. For decades, polls have consistently shown Americans trust Democrats to do a better job on education than Republicans. But a new NPR/Marist poll finds parents with children under 18 in their households — those with the clearest view and skin in the game — now favor Republicans over Democrats for Congress by an almost a two-to-one margin: 60% to 32%.
Teachers, too, have good reason to be concerned about Weingarten’s tin ear and habit of stepping on rakes. For nearly half a century, Gallup’s “honesty and ethics” survey has shown grade-school teachers among the most trusted professionals. At the pandemic’s start in 2020, trust in teachers had jumped to 75%. Today, it’s 64%: still strong but a troubling all-time low.
As long as a majority of our children attend traditional public schools, it’s in the interest of every American for them to perform well and to be trusted by parents. For reasons known only to her, Weingarten appears determined to drive faith in public education into the ground.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/05/how-randi-weingarten-is-actually-undermining-trust-in-public-schools/
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Parent groups react to Biden admin's upcoming Title IX changes: 'Blurring and in effect erasing women'
Parent groups predicted the Biden administration's upcoming changes to Title IX sex discrimination rules would spell danger for students.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos written that Title IX’s sex-based protections were sticking by the definitions of "biological sex, male or female." However, in March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order outlining plans to review Title IX regulations related to gender identity. The administration's reforms include rolling back some due process protections put in place by the Trump administration, and changing the definition of "sex" to include "gender identity."
Twenty-seven parents' rights organizations claiming to represent almost 400,000 members across the country recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging him to heed their concerns about the changes. Many agreed that those alterations could threaten student safety.
"We represent parents, grandparents, and concerned citizens across the country who are worried that the forthcoming rule changes are a politicized effort to placate activists," the organizations, spearheaded by Parents Defending Education, wrote in a letter to Cardona on Tuesday. "In fact, the sweeping changes to Title IX that you are reportedly set to announce would erode the very rights that protect all students – regardless of sex – and ensure a safe and equitable learning environment."
Several of the signatories expanded on their concerns in exclusive interviews with Fox News Digital.
"We see that this idea of identifying students in general by identity than by biological is concerning to us," Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told Fox News Digital. "We’re seeing sexual harassment claims, or harassment claims as language is violence, being used by students who accidentally misgender a child in the classroom. Sometimes genders are fluid. Instances where a child was being told to kill themselves and being bullied by a group of students who were literally changing their gender every day and then the school was looking at harassment violations or harassment claims against that child, which was not the case. These are 11-year-olds."
Miguel Cardona speaks after President-Elect Joe Biden announced his nomination for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware.
Miguel Cardona speaks after President-Elect Joe Biden announced his nomination for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Joshua Roberts)
"We don’t see any reasons why it needs to be changed," she continued. "We think it really is the erasure of women in general. And as mothers we are women, adult human females, who are not birthing people."
"We want to protect women’s rights," she concluded. "We believe the Biden administration is blurring and in effect erasing women in a lot of different ways."
Elicia Brand, Army of Parents president and co-founder, similarly said the main reason that her group signed on to the letter was to safeguard female students.
"Title IX under Obama, and now under Biden, is being twisted and used as a weapon against girls and women, that Title IX was actually written to protect us. And we will suffer the most, particularly our girls who are in sports.
"We don’t want this to be weaponized under Biden while his executive order doesn’t carry the full weight of the law as Trump’s did," she continued. "It is still very dangerous because it gives the Department of Education the ability to bring lawsuits against schools and in that way they have to comply because they can’t lose the money. So the people that will be suffering will be girls and women."
The 1972 Congress, she added, likely had "no idea" that Title IX would be "manipulated to expand from just sex to gender identity."
Local father Benjamin Orr credited the original Title IX language with opening opportunities for his kids, especially for his daughter. Those opportunities were available not just in athletics, he said, but also in the form of academic scholarships.
"When you look at Title IX, it ensures that there’s equity between the sexes for anything related to educational purposes, whether that’s resources, scholarships, or athletics, of course," Orr told Fox News Digital. "And when you change this rule to make it about gender identity, which really can’t be defined…it just opens the door for potential abuse and changes."
"This is really kind of that tipping point that just kind of opens the floodgates to further interpretation, further understanding, and it’s a gray area, there’s no black and white perspective here on right versus wrong," mother Dawn Lang agreed.
Ashley Jacobs, Executive Director and cofounder of Parents Unite, another signatory, also suggested that the reforms would negative impacts both in terms of restroom safety and athletics.
"And it’s an issue because it has everything to do with bathrooms and dorms, and sports teams," she added. "Athletics we can go into that too. If you’re a lacrosse goalie, for example, on a girls’ team and a person who identifies as a girl and is going against you in lacrosse, which is a pretty brutal sport to begin with.
I mean there are just physical differences and we’ve acknowledged that I think mostly. But it’s complicated, and so we just felt that, you know in K-12 this is such a complicated issue, and we’re making it harder, I think, to let schools do what’s best for them, for their students, and we’re making it harder for parents to do what’s best for their kids."
https://www.foxnews.com/media/parent-groups-react-to-biden-administrations-upcoming-title-ix-changes
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Making Sense of the Student Loan Scam
Today’s college students often complain about skyrocketing tuition, and they rightly blame those same higher-ed institutions for saddling them with debt. After all, many of them are now the proud owners of bachelor’s degrees that cost more than $100,000, and they’re bussing tables at a local bar to chip away at the balance.
But in defense of these predatory schools, they merely took advantage of a student loan scam put into place by the very same politicians claiming to be on their side today. That’s why these debt-strapped students shouldn’t be marching against college administrators. Instead, they should be pounding on the doors of Democrats in Washington.
Colleges know that every single undergraduate student walking through their doors is guaranteed more than $50,000 in federal loans, with graduate students able to borrow nearly $140,000. Unsurprisingly, then, tuition rates have soared as this corrupt cycle keeps repeating itself: More loans enable higher tuition, which enables more loans, which enables higher tuition. Now, some Democrats are floating the awful idea (again) of forgiving up to $50,000 of student loan debt.
The Biden administration, however, recently suggested a number closer to $10,000, while adding that loan relief would be limited to those borrowers making less than $125,000.
The idea that the president can simply wipe out student debt is a fantasy, mainly designed to give false hope to young voters whom they hope will be motivated to vote “D” on November 8. But polls currently show that Biden is losing this key demographic.
That’s why Biden is pitching the false idea that he can wipe out student debt on his own. Not even Biden’s own Department of Education believes he has the authority to do so, nor does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Even if Biden tries, he faces many obstacles. For example, as The Washington Times reports, “Mr. Biden hasn’t publicly confirmed that pledge, but acting unilaterally to cancel student loans would stir division within the Democratic Party, invoke Republican opposition and likely face legal challenges.” The Wall Street Journal details some of these legal concerns, but suffice it to say, the Journal notes even Barack Obama’s former top Education Department lawyer says Biden “would be on shaky legal ground.”
To push it over the finish line, the Democrats are — surprise! — making it about race by claiming that alleviating student debt will help black and Hispanic students, as well as boosting the economy and helping the working class. But according to The Wall Street Journal, “The borrowers Democrats really want to help are white-collar workers with advanced degrees who account for 56% of the $1.6 trillion in federal student debt.”
Regardless of whether Biden actually pulls this off, what might a future Republican Congress do about student debt? As political analyst Charles C.W. Cooke suggests: “The first step for the GOP to take would be ending the student-loan program completely. Given the obvious political temptations that program was always going to create, the federal government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first place. But it did, and so here we are.”
Good point. And a Republican Congress and president should apply the same principle to countless other government programs that need to be put on the chopping block. Cooke adds, “If President Biden goes through with his threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must not be allowed to do so again.”
Of course, Republicans have held the reins of power before and failed to fix things, so one wonders what they’d do if given another chance. For now, Democrats are proposing an outrageous plan that lets some college students off the hook while insulting others who worked hard to pay back their loans in good faith. Oh, and it makes inflation worse.
There’s another group of Americans, though, that’s largely ignored in this conversation about student loan forgiveness: the millions who didn’t go to college. Should their taxes go to fund such an ill-conceived giveaway?
On a reassuring note, the nearly 60-year-old student loan scheme is another textbook case of the failure of progressivism. Next time those on the Left propose another government program, we can remind them of this and other failures.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/88165-making-sense-of-the-student-loan-scam-2022-05-06
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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6 May, 2022
University of South Carolina blasted over 'White Student Accountability' meeting
The University of South Carolina is being criticized by a conservative student organization over a "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted at the school.
An email sent to University of South Carolina College of Social Work students invited them to attend the "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted on April 26, according to the conservative student organization Turning Point USA.
According to the event description for the "White Student Accountability Group," participants would learn about their "responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives."
"The purpose of engaging in this project is three-fold:
1) To help social work students recognize both their contribution to and responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives,
2) To encourage students to use their voice, power, and privilege to enact change in their classrooms, community, and practice,
3) To support students in developing skills to host similar groups among peers or colleagues to expand the community dedicated to racial equity and justice," the reported event description states.
A University of South Carolina Spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the "White Student Accountability Group" was part of a student's project and was not officially sponsored by the College of Social Work.
"The Accountability Group was part of a student’s project and was not part of an officially sponsored College of Social Work activity. The meeting was open to everyone and was strictly voluntarily," the spokesperson said.
Several universities across America have "White Accountability Groups," such as Loyola University Maryland and the University of North Texas.
Several faculty members from the University of South Carolina College of Social Work signed a statement, posted on the school's website, "in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and the Black community who persevere through the reality of oppression on a daily basis…"
"As part of our pledge of solidarity, we recognize white privilege and silence contributes to the horrific racial inequities and we commit to fostering growth of our critical consciousness so that we cease to be complicit in the persecution of the Black community," the statement continues. "In our view, the indifference of color-blindness is ineffective in supporting anti-racism and ameliorating white supremacy. Education must stand as an institution of anti-racist action, grounded in the recognition that no one is free and equal until the violence and discrimination perpetrated on the Black community is dismantled."
https://www.foxnews.com/us/university-south-carolina-blasted-over-white-student-accountability-meeting
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Oregon's 'Menstrual Dignity Act' requires schools to place feminine products in boys' bathrooms
Oregon public schools will be required to provide feminine products along with instructions on "how to use" those products in all K-12 bathrooms regardless of gender, in accordance with the state's "Menstrual Dignity Act" signed into law last year.
The controversial mandate, solidified by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, was set to go into full effect during the 2022-2023 school year. A 2021 statement from Portland Public Schools detailed how the act would be implemented long-term.
"Starting next year (2022-2023), products will be available in all restrooms (male, female and all-gender) in every PPS building where education occurs," the statement read.
"To ensure timely compliance, PPS ordered 500 dispensers. Dispensers have been installed in all elementary and middle school girls' restrooms, and more will be installed in all remaining bathrooms, including boys' restrooms, next year.
"Instructions on how to use tampons and pads will be posted in all bathrooms," the source added.
The statement also stressed the need for students to learn about growth and development, noted that some physical education courses are implementing lessons on "the four pillars of Menstrual Dignity" and encouraged parents to have similar discussions with their children to help reduce the "shame and stigma" surrounding menstruation.
The Oregon Department of Education also doubled down on the controversial content by issuing a "Menstrual Dignity for Students" toolkit in March, complete with instructions on how to use menstrual products, segments on faculty and staff training, classroom instruction and tips for "menstruation-positive" language for families.
The toolkit also emphasized the need for menstrual products in all bathrooms because lack of access disproportionately impacts "students of color, students experiencing disabilities, and students experiencing poverty."
"Importantly, [the Menstrual Dignity Act] affirms the right to menstrual dignity for transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and two spirit students by addressing the challenges that some students have managing menstruation while minimizing negative attention that could put them at risk of harm and navigating experiences of gender dysphoria during menstruation," a segment of the introduction read.
"Research also connects gender-affirming bathroom access to supporting student safety at school," the toolkit said.
Republicans outraged by the bill spoke out on the measure. Gubernatorial candidate Bridget Barton slammed Brown for the policy, as well as her stance on abortion, in a statement to Fox News Digital.
"Radical leftist woke policies are destroying Oregon from our streets to our businesses to our schools. But as a mom, a new grandmother, and a Republican candidate for Oregon governor, I can't believe we're even discussing this -- America's most unpopular governor, Kate Brown, is putting free tampons in the boys bathrooms of Oregon's elementary schools.
"Clearly Brown cares more about what's going on in the bathrooms than what's going on in the classrooms," she said.
Barton noted another policy flaw among the state's education system, saying that Oregon's students rank 46th in the nation in reading and math after Brown revoked allegedly "racist" academic requirements.
"We’re at the bottom of the barrel and the career politicians spend our taxpayer money on tampons for little boys," she said. "I'm respectful of all, but it's fair to let little boys be little boys, and little girls be little girls. Instead, leftist education bureaucrats are pushing this radical nonsense, spending precious class time coming between Oregon parents and their kids, creating activist factories instead of strong community schools.
"Oregon's kids deserve so much better from their schools; right now Oregon's public schools don't deserve our kids."
Barton said she is running to "put a stop" to these leftist policies and to better education in her state.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/oregons-menstrual-dignity-act-requires-schools-place-feminine-products-boys-bathrooms
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NY Times newsletter breaks down ruinous school closures: 'Remote learning was a failure'
A New York Times newsletter broke down the negative effects of school closures Thursday and affirmed what many believed to be true during the pandemic: "Remote learning was a failure."
The New York Times' David Leonhardt outlined the learning loss experienced by students who stayed home for remote learning in 2020 and 2021. "On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window," he wrote.
He noted that keeping schools closed throughout the pandemic made "economic and racial inequality in learning" much worse.
"Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian," the newsletter said.
"Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were," Leonhardt wrote, adding that remote learning did more harm than good. "Many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020."
Unfortunately, many left-leaning officials appeared to only change course on remote learning following the omicron outbreak in winter 2021-22.
New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait wrote in January that the progressive left likely was starting to notice that school closures throughout the pandemic were a "catastrophic mistake."
"Many liberals are complaining that the recent debates over short-term closings are creating a hysterical overreaction from people still angry about the 2020-21 school shutdown," Chait wrote. "Perhaps a first step to building trust that we are not planning to repeat a catastrophic mistake is to admit the mistake in the first place."
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (ATF), was criticized Wednesday for a lack of self-awareness with regard to teachers unions and their role in keeping schools shuttered throughout the pandemic.
Weingarten, who lobbied for years to delay the reopening of schools, said this week, "Our kids are in crisis … for two years of disruption, two years of looking at the screens, two years of not having a normal kind of routine and rhythm, recovery is really tough."
A 2020 New York Times op-ed admitted that former president Donald Trump was "right" about keeping schools open.
"Some things are true even though President Trump says them," Nicholas Kristof wrote at the time. "Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children."
Still, the Chicago Teachers Union defied their city's order to return to in-person instruction in early January 2022 amid an uptick in omicron cases, which prompted a lot of backlash, even from liberals.
Even Mayor Lori Lightfoot came out against the union and threatened to withhold pay from teachers.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-newsletter-breaks-down-ruinous-school-closures
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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5 May, 2022
University of California Suicide Watch
It seems determined to end the university’s preeminence.
Californians have long prided themselves on having one of the world’s premier public universities, in addition to great private schools like Stanford and Cal Tech. Forbes ranks the University of California at Berkeley as the best college in America and places three other UC schools (UCLA, San Diego, and Davis) among the top 20. U.S. News & World Report ranks the UC schools a bit lower, but both UCLA and Berkeley are in its top 25—ahead of the State University of New York (SUNY), the University of Texas, and all other state universities.
UC and state officials now seem determined to end the university’s preeminence by declaring war on academic excellence. Great universities like Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford have one overriding goal: to maximize the quantity and quality of the knowledge they create and disseminate. Great schools strive for the best, brightest, and most diligent students and faculty, allowing them to achieve superior outcomes.
For several years, however, the UC system—whose 10 campuses enrolled nearly 295,000 students this past fall—has been backing away from its commitment to excellence. In 2020, for example, the UC Board of Regents voted to drop the required SAT or ACT admissions test, despite a faculty committee’s recommendation to continue requiring it for undergraduate admission because it provides valuable information that enables UC to select highly qualified students. While many schools dropped the college readiness tests during the COVID pandemic, top schools, such as MIT and Georgia Tech—seeking to attract future science and technology leaders—have started reinstating them. As MIT’s admissions dean explained, “our ability to accurately predict student academic success ... is significantly improved by considering standardized testing.” Because of grade inflation and the abysmal quality of some high schools, grades alone are often a woefully inadequate predictor of collegiate success.
An even greater threat to UC’s academic integrity comes from the current attempt to require freshman applicants to complete an “ethnic studies” course in high school—though many high schools don’t offer such courses. Proposed guidelines for the ethnic studies classes suggested they “should create and honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels.” They argue students should learn about “systems of power and oppression,” such as “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” In short, if you want to attend the University of California you must be indoctrinated in a racialist ideology that many—I dare say most—Americans believe is fundamentally wrong. As a letter signed by more than 100 UC faculty put it, “The university should never be in the position of forcing a particular political agenda upon its own students—let alone UC applicants across the state and the nation.”
A larger group of nearly 2,000 UC faculty, students, and community members also condemned the proposal, saying it would “incite bigotry and hatred in California classrooms, particularly against Jewish ... students,” pointing to the anti-Israel and anti-Zionism comments of some of the proposal’s advocates.
Perhaps more outrageous in a democracy is the fact that a small group of individuals associated with the University of California is trying to force its ideology on high schools, whose curriculum is normally, and properly, set by state and local school boards.
It is arguably appropriate for governmental authorities to mandate that graduates of publicly supported high schools study, for example, algebra; geometry; English, American, and world history; and some science before receiving their diplomas. Such requirements can help ensure that high school graduates are at least minimally knowledgeable about important things all adults should know. But imposing an ideology that deliberately denigrates Americans of European descent, and the extraordinary accomplishments of our nation, is not only wrong but despicable.
As someone who for years ranked colleges for a major magazine, I confidently predict that if the University of California continues its denigration of academic standards and its mandatory woke indoctrination of students, it will soon fall from its academic perch, and California high schoolers who can’t get into, or afford, one of the Golden State’s leading private schools will look to attend college at out-of-state institutions where traditional standards still apply.
The net result will be an acceleration of the already worrisome out-migration from California.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14161
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Australia: Struggling school students to be blocked from teaching degrees
As 15,000 angry NSW teachers marched in the streets demanding pay rises of up to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, the federal government announced $40m in extra funding to recruit hundreds more engineers, lawyers, tech experts and tradies into classrooms.
Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said 700 more mid-career professionals would be retrained through the Teach for Australia program, to enter classrooms next year and in 2024 if the Coalition were re-elected.
He said he was concerned that at least a quarter of maths teachers in Australia were not qualified to teach the subject, and that one in 10 university graduates in education courses were failing the literacy and numeracy test that was required to graduate.
Mr Robert said his 12-year-old son had been able to answer some of the maths questions that 10 per cent of university graduates got wrong. “I was reading out example questions to our sons at the weekend and my boys were answering them,’’ he said.
“The test is designed for the top 30 per cent of (school leavers) and we can’t have the people looking to teach our students failing it.’’
Sample questions include: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’
Many of the literacy questions are multiple choice, to check comprehension and identify spelling errors.
Mr Robert said a re-elected Morrison government would seek consensus from the states and territories to mandate that students pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) as a condition of starting their university degree.
Under existing arrangements, undergraduate teachers can sit the test at any time during their degree, but cannot graduate until they pass. But Mr Robert said university education faculties should only enrol students who had already passed the test.
“Ten per cent of our teaching graduates are failing on basic literacy and numeracy,’’ he said. “Ten per cent (of those) are failing it not once, not twice, but three times.’’
Mr Robert also announced $13.4m to change teacher accreditation standards, to halve the time it takes mid-career professionals with a university degree to retrain as school teachers.
The federal government would need state and territory approval to change the graduate diploma of education from two years to one.
Mr Robert said two years of retraining was a barrier for workers wanting to switch careers into teaching.
“One year to learn the pedagogy of teaching at university is enough,’’ he said. “You could get a whole bunch of older tradies who aren’t on the tools anymore to do a one-year graduate diploma and teach industrial art (in schools).’’
A re-elected Morrison government would also fund 60 workers to retrain as teachers through La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which combines a Master of Teaching with part-time work as “paraprofessional teachers’’ in hard-to-staff schools in Victoria.
And $10.8m would be spent to develop new micro-credentials to upskill existing teachers in teaching reading through phonics, explicit teaching methods, and managing disruptive students.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/struggling-school-students-to-be-blocked-from-teaching-degrees/news-story/726bcd0ae1f415af0e9d6daa57466e88
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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4 May, 2022
Children told to stop eating HAM SANDWICHES in ridiculous 'warning' note sent home to parents in school newsletters
Primary school students have been urged to 'ditch the ham sandwich' in leaflets inserted in their newsletters and send home to parents.
Leaflets from the Cancer Council telling kids to stop eating ham sandwiches have been put into public school newsletters by teachers in NSW.
'Ditch the ham sandwich' is the Cancer Council's latest anti-meat edict and follows on from a previous leaflet telling children to have a 'meat-free Monday'.
But both parents and pork producers have defended the humble ham sandwich and railed against the 'politically correct message'.
However, Channel Nine's U.S. correspondent, Amelia Adams, admitted she 'wasn't surprised'. 'It's such a nanny state back there,' she told Karl Stefanovic during a Today show cross on Tuesday morning.
A pork company owner said the Cancer Council leaflets go 'too far'.
'Ham is actually a product which has been developed over the last 5,000 years and people have eaten it through the ages without any problems,' David Bligh of Bringelly Pork and Bacon told News Corp.
'I think sometimes these politically correct messages can go a little bit too far and not be as practical as they should be.'
A Cancer Council spokeswoman said the leaflets are part of a health campaign to get children eating better food.
'Because there is strong evidence that eating processed meats and too much red meat is associated with increased risk of bowel cancer, our cancer prevention messages advise everyone to limit their processed meat consumption and cut down on red meat,' she said.
She added that schools sent the messages to include with material sent home with pupils, were not under any obligation to do so.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10775019/School-children-told-meat-free-Monday-pork-industry-blasts-woke-vegan-edict.html
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The dangerous rise of academic diversity quotas
Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.
Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).
For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.
The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated. Once rare, diversity statements have become ubiquitous in the announcements for new positions. The demand is worded in various ways, but this job announcement for a cosmologist at Cornell University represents the diversity statement’s typical form:
Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicants [sic] efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.
If an applicant is puzzled by this circular logic, a university may supply guidance, couched in New Age neologisms and platitudes. UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offers this gem:
“Mindful Transparent Judgment” (MTJ) embraces the simultaneous messiness and virtue of our discretion. Uncabined discretion coupled with the presumption that we are already objective and fair leave us [sic] susceptible to implicit biases and structural norms that undermine equity, diversity, and inclusion. But mechanical adherence to pre-defined rules and processes set us up for a different sort of failure. In lieu of either extreme, MTJ challenges us to thoughtfully cabin and transparently employ discretion.
Don’t worry, this says to the applicant, we have no idea what we mean either; we just want to let a hundred flowers bloom. Soothing phrases, like “celebrate,” “vibrant communities,” “inclusive excellence,” and “lively interest,” are sprinkled about like beautiful flowers. The more discerning applicant will see the evasive lawyer-speak that is masking the actual message: your application will be judged by conformity to our de facto hiring quota. Universities naturally deny any such thing, of course. They have no choice: racial and gender quotas are illegal. But the quotas are there, well hidden within the details of the faculty search process.
Paranoid much? Canadian universities, which operate under different standards of law, are quite open about their diversity quotas: white men literally need not apply for a position as one of Canada’s 2,000 prestigious Research Chairs. Exclusion, not inclusion, is revealed as the agenda of the academy’s new overlords. Give Canada credit at least for honesty. In the US, stealthy subversion will be the instrument for depriving the sciences of mastery of their professions. Their target is the faculty search.
A faculty search has traditionally been a complex minuet between a university administration and its faculty. Both parties are obliged to participate in the dance. Faculty have possession of the precious jewels without which administrations cannot exist: no student applies, nor does any academic strive, to join a university for the prestige of its administrators. In their turn, administrations covet the jewels and want to control them. The traditional faculty search is intended to balance these disparate interests, and for decades it worked pretty well, with both faculty and administrators left to tend their own gardens in peace. No more. The new managerial class (let us call them diversicrats) has become the instrument whereby the faculty can finally be dispossessed of those coveted jewels.
Here is how the takeover works: a job search starts with an ad hoc search committee that seeks qualified applicants. The search committee reviews applications, winnows the field down to a few individuals to be brought in for interviews, then crafts a recommendation to the administration for making a formal job offer.
A search committee traditionally comprises faculty capable of judging a candidate’s qualifications and suitability. For a position in cosmology, for example, the search committee will empanel a number of physicists whose professional opinion should carry great weight. A representative from the university’s human resources office also usually has a seat, to ensure compliance to employment law, and to guard against members of the search committee asking stupid or illegal questions during interviews.
In the new regime, a “diversity officer,” appointed by the university’s diversity administrator (usually someone with vice-presidential rank), now sits on the search committee. The diversity officer conveys to the committee the diversity vice-president’s wishes, and reports back how closely the committee is conforming to those demands. The diversity vice-president can then veto or reconstruct the short list of candidates invited for interviews, or even dissolve or repopulate the search committee to produce a conformed outcome.
To add an air of objectivity, search committees may be provided a rubric for carrying out the new diversity litmus test. From San Jose State University’s rubric, for example, high marks accrue for attention to “ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and cultural differences” (my emphasis). Low marks are given for speaking of “diversity in vague terms” (what kind of diversity?) or not understanding the “personal challenges that underrepresented individuals face in academia” (how is one supposed to do that?). A candidate with too independent an opinion, or who declines to genuflect to the diversity agenda, can kiss his prospects goodbye.
The diversity rubric has an interesting pedigree. The San Jose State University rubric borrows considerably from UC Berkeley’s rubric, which was adopted for the entire University of California system. Cornell University, Emory University, Brandeis University, University of Michigan, and many others have adopted identical, or very similar, discriminatory tests for candidates. The irony is hard to miss. Diversity rubrics bear an eerie similarity to the supposedly objective literacy tests of Jim Crow (e.g., Louisiana’s). The intent is the same: only the target differs.
The common language of these proliferating rubrics prompts the question: do they have a common ancestor? Grinnell College (probably inadvertently) points to the answer. Grinnell belongs to the Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance (LACRELA), a consortium of fifty-one member colleges that coordinate and establish diversity and equity policies. The LACRELA, in turn, is part of the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center (USCREC), which, for a healthy fee, will advise colleges and universities (as well as schools and businesses) on their diversity shortcomings, including formulating rubrics for evaluating diversity statements. Which prompts an additional question: who funds the USCREC? The answer can be found on the USCREC’s homepage: a who’s-who list of wealthy donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies…and the US Department of Education.
So, scientists? Do you still think you’re in control of your profession? Or do you see that the faculty search been reduced to a Potemkin façade, behind which your profession is being stolen from you? When will you decide to take control back?
I have another question. If discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexual proclivity is illegal, what is one to make of the vast ball of collusion of wealthy donors, government agencies, and university administrations that has built up to promote illegal discrimination? Isn’t this the definition of conspiracy?
I will give the last word to Grinnell College. The self-celebratory webpage of Grinnell’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion states that their students
bring varied geographic, ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic experiences to Grinnell — but their common traits far outweigh their differences.
Thus, my final question. If “common traits far outweigh their differences,” why should hiring new faculty be geared so strongly to amplifying those differences? Just asking.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-dangerous-rise-of-academic-diversity-quotas/
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Pa.: Once Exemplary College Muzzles Speech
It’s hardly news today when a college prioritizes wokeness and political correctness over genuine intellectual inquiry and a steadfast commitment to the free exchange of ideas. It is news, however, when a college takes aim at one of the few remaining parts of academia that is truly outstanding and emphatically worth preserving. Such is the case at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Arnold Palmer and Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers fame).
On April 7 through 9, St. Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, impressively built and shepherded over the past 22 years through the diligent efforts of Professor Brad Watson, hosted what was without exaggeration one of the finest academic conferences that one could hope to find anywhere in America.
The Center—whose advisory board includes (among others) Robbie George, Wilfred McClay, and Charles Kesler—invited nine speakers to its annual Culture and Policy Conference, which this year was entitled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis.” Due to Covid restrictions, it was the first time that the usually annual Culture and Policy Conference had been hosted since 2019–and also the first time since Father Paul Taylor became St. Vincent College’s president. Taylor would quickly prove the aptness of the word “panic” in the conference’s title.
The conference featured one compelling presentation after another, all of which are now posted online. It was a rich opportunity for students to hear viewpoints outside of the academic mainstream so dominated by the groupthink Left. Scott Atlas, Jeffrey Tucker, Wilfred Reilly, and I all gave presentations on the ill-advised response to Covid, during which scientific knowledge and centuries of Western norms were often abandoned in favor of costly and coercive lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements. Allison Stanger talked about Big Tech and the threat it poses to our republic. David Azerrad discussed the tension between racial preferences and colorblind justice. Keith Whitaker gave an interesting and nuanced account of the history of financial panics and what they tell us about human nature. Johnny Burtka offered students helpful advice gleaned from great books. And Jacob Howland capped things off by talking about how our “crisis of logos”—our decreasing willingness, or ability, to engage in meaningful discussions about the great questions of our day, or any day—requires our full attention and commitment to reverse.
As if on cue, St. Vincent’s administration promptly confirmed this crisis of logos. After a few of the many students who had attended Azerrad’s talk complained about it, President Taylor and his administration initially censored the publication not only of the video of Azerrad’s presentation but also of the videos of the other eight conference presentations as well, as Howland recounted for City Journal. After being pressured by national organizations that fight for freedom of speech, the administration subsequently relented on posting the videos. But then it promptly took aim at the Center that Watson has built, giving every indication that the administration is determined to make this the final such free-flowing Culture and Policy Conference that St. Vincent College will ever allow.
President Taylor released a letter on April 19 saying that in order to “protect the diversity of opinion critical to our students’ educational growth,” only “responsible opinion” will henceforth be allowed to be expressed at St. Vincent. The judges of “responsible opinion” will not be serious scholars like Watson but rather the college president and his administrative cabinet. Taylor writes, “The President and Cabinet members will now approve all sponsored speakers.”
What’s more, the Center that Watson built and Taylor merely inherited was forced to undergo immediate “structural changes” so that it now “reports directly” to Jeff Mallory, the school’s Chief Operating Officer. Until he was hired by Taylor, Mallory was working as the Assistant Vice President for Diversity, Inclusion, and Student Advancement at Duquesne. This is how one kills an academic center without formally removing its scholarly head.
The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says that Taylor’s new policy “could be the most extreme example of guest speaker censorship that FIRE has seen in its more-than-20-year history.” FIRE calls the policy “a brazen violation of Saint Vincent’s binding commitments to free expression and academic freedom.” Those “principles,” as the group wrote in a letter to Taylor on April 22, “bar administrators like yourself from usurping student and faculty rights to decide which views are welcome on campus.” FIRE asserts that St. Vincent’s new policy “could also jeopardize its accreditation.”
A college spokesman claimed in the wake of Taylor’s letter that the administration “will not institute prior censorship of a speaker’s remarks.” Note that the remarks could still be reviewed, however, and even if the remarks were not censored, the speaker could still be disapproved—thereby providing censorship via other means. It’s hard to see how Taylor and company could otherwise have kept someone like Azerrad from speaking—their clear goal—given that his status as an assistant professor at Hillsdale College surely clears the bar for scholarly credibility.
So, what was so objectionable about Professor Azerrad’s presentation that it could be said to justify effectively torpedoing a decades-old center that has been an academic jewel? In his letter, Taylor claims that Azerrad’s remarks were “inconsistent with the fundamental mission of the College,” which “centers around the inherent belief that only when we lift up human dignity can we move the world forward.” Since Azerrad apparently failed this fuzzy test, Taylor says, “I . . . denounce this lecture and am sorry that this happened at Saint Vincent.” Taylor adds that students and faculty should “be inspired to search for truth,” but only if that search will “lift up human dignity.” If the latter condition is not met, then the search for truth apparently must yield. A college that genuinely understands its mission would be embarrassed to suggest that a significant tension exists between the search for truth and the fostering of dignity.
More insight into the administration’s specific objections to Azerrad’s remarks shows up in a statement edited by Mallory and released on April 13 above the signature of Dean Gary Quinlivan. That statement says that the college opposes “any point of view which may be interpreted as a form of invidious discrimination which inherently degrades the sanctity of human life.” This doesn’t remotely characterize Azerrad’s actual remarks, and it is hard to imagine how anyone who listened to them could claim otherwise. (Azerrad’s remarks, as well as the rest of the presentations, are available online.)
The Quinlivan statement also speaks of “systemic bigotry” and implicitly accuses Azerrad of such, even though Azerrad lamented in his remarks that “we were de facto [a society] of white supremacy for most of our history”—a claim he said would be “silly” and “foolish” to deny. And the Quinlivan statement specifically objects to Azerrad’s having “downplayed and minimized the role of several highly accomplished African Americans,” such as George Washington Carver and Kamala Harris, whom Azerrad said “would not be vice president of the United States of America today” had her father not been black.
I agree with Quinlivan that Azerrad was too hard on Carver. Saying, “If he were not black, no one in America today would know who George Washington Carver is,” as Azerrad did, misses the point that a key aspect of what distinguished Carver—who was winning prominent awards before World War II, in an era that was hardly woke—was his rise from slavery to college and then to scientific prominence, despite having been denied a relationship with either of his parents and having faced undeniable prejudice. Nevertheless, Azerrad’s statement is hardly a capital offense. Indeed, if this was the most objectionable comment across some seven hours of presentations by nine speakers, why is President Taylor so intent on wresting control of the Center, or at least of its flagship conference, away from Professor Watson?
As for Vice President Harris, President Biden made it crystal clear that he was limiting his search to a woman, and Representative James Clyburn, to whom Biden effectively owed his nomination, made it almost equally clear that he was pushing Biden to pick a black woman. Most people would presumably agree with Azerrad that Harris, whose presidential campaign did not even survive until—let alone beyond—Iowa, would not have been picked had she not fit the “correct” demographic profile. In any event, Azerrad’s expressed opinion hardly “degrades the sanctity of human life,” the crime of which he apparently stands accused.
Taylor, who also released a message condemning “racism” in the wake of Azerrad’s talk, further opined that Azerrad’s remarks “did a disservice to Fred Rogers, for whom the building in which the speech was given was named.” This may seem an odd statement, but it makes more sense in the context that most of us delivered our presentations within a stone’s throw of the room in which Rogers’s actual sweaters, shoes, and puppets are on display. As a childhood fan of Rogers’s endearing show, I’ll go along with Taylor’s line of thought and take a shot at what Rogers might actually have thought. I suspect that the kindly Rogers, who seemed to value every last person as an individual child of God, would have applauded Azerrad’s courage in presenting heterodox views to a somewhat hostile crowd, likely would have admired the crispness and analytical rigor of his arguments, might have wished he had employed a bit more pathos and a bit less provocation, and likely would have appreciated the compelling words with which Azerrad concluded his remarks:
“The choice before the country, it seems to me, is clear. We either develop the stomach for colorblindness, treating everyone equally under the law, not discriminating, being polite to one another in the private sector—all are equal in America, come what may of the outcomes—or we decide to tear down our civilization in this mad quest to achieve equal racial outcomes by granting unfair privileges to some.”
Azerrad’s presentation was pretty much an embrace of treating members of every race equally and a rejection of affirmative action, broadly construed, which he argued is counterproductive for everyday Americans of any race—no matter how much establishment elites may love it. This is a view that many, perhaps even most, Americans share. The fact that St. Vincent’s administration would find this so intolerable says a lot about the university’s level of toleration.
Even more so, the notion that St. Vincent’s administration would view this extraordinary conference, when taken as a whole, as having detracted more than it added to the college and to its students’ experience, is incredible. It shows evidence of a college in serious trouble and perhaps beyond repair. The sad thing is that, until what seems like yesterday, St. Vincent College had been one of the few places left in all of American academia that had featured anything genuinely worth celebrating and preserving.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans enjoy extraordinary freedom of speech as a matter of law but often limit their speech as a matter of practice, due to the power of public opinion in a democratic society. But the modern-day Left is on a mission to shrink the range of acceptable opinion (“responsible opinion”) to a degree that even the prescient Tocqueville could only have imagined. What’s different from Tocqueville’s day is that the Left’s suppression of speech isn’t majoritarian but authoritarian. It doesn’t represent tyranny of the majority but rather tyranny of the minority. It actually defies the majority in two ways: by insisting that people shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think, even if they hold views shared by a majority of their fellow citizens; and by rejecting the majority’s view that free speech is not only valuable but essential.
St. Vincent College’s actions are the latest example of this larger phenomenon. Whether the college gets away with it—and the battle is not yet over—will say a lot about the state of free speech and academic freedom in America today.
https://www.city-journal.org/st-vincent-college-takes-aim-at-academic-freedom?
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 May, 2022
I’m a Full-Time Working Mom. Here’s Why I Love Homeschooling My Daughter
Any working mom can attest that work never quite turns off. We don’t necessarily get to sleep in on the weekends or kick back and sip wine when we get home from our jobs.
Most likely, we’re cooking dinner, giving baths, refereeing fights, negotiating on bedtime or television, reading stories, and trying to accomplish the million things on our to-do lists once we get home.
So, why add one more responsibility to the list—especially one as important as educating our kids?
That wasn’t the plan for me, but when my husband and I viewed the education landscape in 2021—when schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland, were in remote-only mode and the state pushes a radical gender curriculum that starts in pre-K—we saw homeschooling as the best option.
That meant a team effort where we both would be teaching ary. Luckily, my husband does shift work as a firefighter and could be the primary teacher. But he needed help, so I filled in by working remotely to give him a breather and help teach our daughter.
It’s a side hustle I have come to love, more so than any other I’ve done in the past—and I had the good fortune of writing a contributing column in the Capital Gazette newspaper for a time.
When we started kindergarten at home, it wasn’t all show-and-tell and playtime. Rosemary could write some letters well, but she struggled with others. Some of her numbers would be backward. Some days, she would be easily discouraged and want to give up before we even got started.
But my husband and I would coax her back and work on building up her foundation in a particular subject.
Over time, we saw the results get better. She was able to trace words and then write them independently with more clarity. She is memorizing more of her addition and subtraction problems.
A few weeks ago, my husband taught Rosemary how to ride her bike without training wheels.
Each accomplishment has bolstered her self-esteem with authentic confidence and empowerment. She understands more what her place is in our family and society, and my husband and I have an upfront view of those wins and challenges.
Being responsible for Rosemary’s education compelled me to try new roles that I might not have otherwise considered. We participated in a weekly homeschooling co-op this school year, where my husband and I shared teaching responsibilities for a few subjects.
We also joined American Heritage Girls, an alternative to the Girl Scouts, and helped as troop leaders. These opportunities have been great for Rosemary, but they’ve also pushed me outside my comfort zone.
Each co-op lesson or troop activity was sometimes foreign and nerve-wracking. But seeing kids glean some new information or smile after doing a group craft made the buildup and effort worthwhile.
More Input, Control Over Her Education
Figuring out the education you want for your child can be overwhelming at first, but once you get your bearings, it’s amazing how much freedom you have to determine what your child learns.
We followed the Code of Maryland Regulations for homeschooling to make sure Rosemary received regular and frequent lessons on English, math, science, art, music, health, physical education, and social studies. We added religion to fulfill requirements to be in a homeschooling umbrella group.
But we had a lot of freedom to try several options. We used several workbooks, followed a full-scale curriculum in Saxon Math, watched educational videos, made homemade worksheets, and took impromptu nature walks and field trips.
This allowed my husband and me to figure out what methods were most effective, and it gave Rosemary some variety in her learning.
And we’ve allowed Rosemary to provide some input in her curriculum. After we had several science lessons on the solar system, Rosemary declared we should be done with outer space and focus instead on animals. I was happy to comply.
Most importantly, we aren’t exposing Rosemary to books and concepts that would undermine her education and her view of others around her.
I read several “woke” children’s books for The Heritage Foundation a few months ago. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Suffice it to say, those books are not part of our revolving library at home. Instead, we get to focus on the topics and goals to help Rosemary to grow up to be a critical thinker—not to be indoctrinated by toxic ideologies like critical race theory.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/25/im-a-full-time-working-mom-heres-why-i-love-homeschooling-my-daughter/
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Jeff Jacoby: Canceling student debt will make things worse
FOR WELL over a year, President Biden has been under pressure from leading Democrats to issue an executive order cancelling $50,000 of debt for every American with an outstanding student loan. For most of that time he has stuck to the position he took as a candidate: He was open to $10,000 per borrower in debt relief but $50,000 was too much, and he wanted the legal authority for such a policy to come from Congress. In the meantime, Biden continued to extend the federal freeze on student loan repayments first put in place during the Trump administration. The latest extension, announced this month, lasts until Aug. 31.
But on Monday came hints that Biden has set aside his skepticism about the legality and wisdom of absolving tens of millions of borrowers' debts. CBS News reported that the president told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that he is considering various options to forgive a substantial swath of student loans. "I'm looking to do something on that, and I think you're going to like what I do," he said, according one lawmaker who attended the meeting. Later that day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden "would make a decision about any cancellation of student debt" before the end of August.
The decision he should make is that he was right the first time.
For an unpopular Democratic president heading into a difficult midterm election, unilaterally canceling college debt may be good politics. It manifestly is not good policy. It represents moral hazard taken to an extreme, a recklessly expensive giveaway to a politically influential bloc of voters that will encourage more bad decisions in the future and exacerbate problems already at the crisis stage.
How would canceling student debt make life in America worse? Let us count the ways.
1. It would be inflationary.
Large-scale student debt forgiveness will worsen inflation. That would be a problem at any time, but with the inflation rate now at a 40-year high and the economy teetering on the brink of recession, it should be unthinkable.
Prices soar when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. As the federal government massively boosted the money supply over the past two years, the purchasing power of the dollar dwindled. Freeing borrowers from their obligation to repay loans would amount to another gusher of funds. As it is, the current freeze on loan repayment — no one has had to pay a nickel toward their student debt since March 2020 — has been fueling the inflationary fires by about $5 billion each month. That's a trivial effect compared with the impact of erasing borrowers' liability altogether. As Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution has noted, "Forgiving all student debt would be a transfer larger than the amounts the nation has spent over the past 20 years on unemployment insurance, larger than the amount it has spent on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and larger than the amount it has spent on food stamps." The result would be even more upward pressure on inflation.
2. It would worsen inequity.
Student debt is disproportionately an upper-middle-class phenomenon, and wiping college loans off the books would enrich the relatively well-off at the expense of the less fortunate. Only a minority of Americans have earned a college degree, and only a minority of them have gone on to graduate school. That minority-within-a-minority — which includes doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists — owes half of all outstanding student debt. It is logical for graduate students to take out more loans, since their advanced degrees generally lead to much higher earnings over the course of their careers. Liquidating that debt leaves them even more affluent and compels the majority of Americans who never got to go to college to help pay the tab for many of those who did.
And as if canceling student loans isn't regressive enough, it is made even more unfair by the fact that the borrowers are more likely to have jobs. The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent. For Americans with only a high school education, unemployment now stands at more than 5 percent. Why should the debts of the well-educated and well-employed be treated more indulgently than the financial burdens of those whose path in life hasn't been so favored?
3. It would deepen cynicism.
Unearned debt forgiveness disseminates a corrosive message. It signals to Americans that they should regard their liabilities as someone else's problem. It promotes the mindset that defaulting on debts is not shameful but understandable — and that government exists to bail out defaulters. It mocks those who behaved responsibly — the ones who saved more and worked second jobs to pay for college or who deferred higher education until they could afford it. And it's a slap in the face to college graduates who faithfully repaid their loans.
"I have over $17,000 in student-loan debt, and I didn't go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass," lamented Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a December speech. "This is unacceptable."
But her decision was the right one: If you can't afford another degree — or a bigger house, or another car — you shouldn't get one. What's "unacceptable" is the lesson Ocasio-Cortez has apparently internalized: that she shouldn't be expected to pay back the loan that got her through college and put her on the path to success (and a $174,000 congressional salary). No good can come from the entrenchment of such cynical thinking.
4. It would drive up the cost of college.
The more the government does to make higher education affordable, the more unaffordable it becomes. Since 1980, the cost of going to college has increased 1,200 percent — more than five times the overall inflation of 236 percent. Much of that is the unintended consequence of steadily rising federal student aid. As a tidal wave of public dollars has been channeled into grants and guaranteed loans, colleges have happily raised their prices to soak those dollars up. Federal aid gives schools every incentive to keep tuition costly. Why would they reduce their sticker price to a level that more families could afford, when doing so would mean kissing millions of government dollars goodbye?
For Washington to now cancel hundreds of billions in unpaid student debt — while continuing to issue and guarantee even more college loans — would be to double down on this predatory cycle. Far from reforming the out-of-control loan program that has had such a catastrophic effect on college costs and student borrowing, it would turbocharge it.
If Biden is indeed gearing up to deliver radical student-debt relief, he is making a mistake. It may win votes for his party. But it will hurt more Americans than it helps and leave long-term economic and social harm in its wake.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26186/canceling-student-debt-will-make-things-worse
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Australia: Jewish leaders condemn antisemitic Melbourne student union
A group of prominent Jewish leaders have condemned a motion passed by the University of Melbourne’s student union after it pledged support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, sparking fears it could have a flow-on effect across university campuses.
The student union passed a wide-ranging motion on Friday condemning Zionism as a “racist colonial ideology” and pledging its support for the BDS movement, urging the university leadership to endorse an academic boycott that would cut ties with Israeli institutions, researchers, and academics that support the “Israeli oppression of Palestinians”.
The Australian understands the union is the first student representative body to pass a motion formally supporting the BDS movement in the country.
The motion, which was passed 10-8 by the student council on Friday, stated the union’s endorsement of the BDS movement had been “long overdue” and would encourage other student bodies to adopt similar resolutions in solidarity with Palestinians.
“Students in Palestine and around the world have been key participants in the fight against the illegal occupation of Palestine, protesting, organising, and creating a discussion on respective campuses … it’s long overdue for a clear and firm stance by UMSU on these crimes,” the motion read.
Jewish leaders blasted the union for creating a “fictitious” and “one-sided narrative” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the resolution as “perverse” and “blatantly anti-Semitic”.
Jewish Affairs Council director Colin Rubinstein said on Sunday that the language of the motion was something that could have been expected from “Hamas or Hezbollah … not from the student union of an esteemed centre of learning here in Australia”.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry chief executive Peter Wertheim said it was possible other university student councils “would follow suit” and adopt a similar “anti-Semitic” motion, but added that it would be a mistake to conclude there was a “broad student consensus behind these views”.
Adelaide University’s student representative council is considering a similar motion to UMSU, while the University of Western Australia’s student guild last year altered its support of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, suspending its clause condemning calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.
In February, Sydney University’s student body passed a motion supporting the boycott of the Sydney Festival but has not passed a formal motion supporting the BDS movement.
Mr Wertheim said the ability of a handful of student activists to pass through “propagandistic and racist resolutions” highlighted the urgent need for universities to adopt and apply the remembrance alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism.
The Australian sought comment from the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide student unions, who were unavailable to reply.
The Anti-Defamation Commission says acts of anti-Semitism in Australia have reached “pitch fever” following reports vandals had defaced the Lilydale Eagles Soccer Club in Melbourne, drawing Nazi swastikas on the club’s oval.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/jewish-leaders-condemn-student-union-support-for-palestinians-as-antisemitic/news-story/399464ffbcfd5ceec8757116abda2930
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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2 May, 2022
Many of the new working class are college-educated -- and they don't like their situation
<i>In the days when America used to make things, people used to think of the working class as workers on a factory assembly line. Many jobs in new industries such as Amazon and Starbucks are however just as routine, with the wrinkle that such jobs are usually more poorly paid than the old factory jobs. So worker dissatisfaction in such new workplaces has become widespread and that has generated the same old pressures towards unionization.
The NYT of course implies below that unionization will be helpful, even though unionization is more likely to lead to more automation and unemployment, as companies hit back. The reality is that such jobs will still exist and still be poorly paid regardless.
So is there a better solution to the problem available? Probably not. Such jobs will always be unattractive and poorly paid for many of those who work in them. They always have been and always will.
Only a big societal change in likely to change the situation. Only a reversal of credentialism is likely to help. The unending pressure on people to get higher and higher educational credentials is a large part of the problem. Only a change in those pressures is likely to change things in the workplace.
Much of the dissatsifaction driving the move to unionization originates in people being made the false promise that more education will lead to better jobs. For many it will not. For them it would have been better NOT to undertake ever higher levels of education. They are right to be angered by the false promises that have been made to them. Disillusionment with college education seems now to be catching on. One can only hope that it continues</i>
Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.
Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.
Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”
In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.
And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.
“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”
These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.
Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.
And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.
Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”
While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”
That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.
More here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/college-workers-starbucks-amazon-unions.html
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Amazon Targets Conservative Children’s Book About Gender Identity
Once again, Amazon has shown it’s on the side of leftist activists, not free speech.
Matt Walsh, a popular conservative podcast host and writer at The Daily Wire, just released a children’s book titled “Johnny the Walrus.” The book, according to the description on Amazon, tells the tale of Johnny, who likes to pretend to be a dinosaur or a knight.
But one day “when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind,” states the description.
Amazon is clearly trying to squash Walsh’s book.
According to Walsh, his picture book has been removed from the category of children’s books and moved to political books. Ads for the book on Amazon also have been rejected by the tech giant as not being “appropriate for all audiences”—an umbrella term for standards that ban advertising for books promoting incest and pedophilia, among other things.
Amazon did not response to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.
Despite all this, Walsh’s book is soaring on Amazon, becoming No. 1 in books Wednesday.
This isn’t the first time Amazon has targeted conservative books. Last year, Amazon blocked ads for the new book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, which attempted to purchase the ads.)
After The Daily Signal reported on its actions against the Gonzalez book, Amazon reversed its decision and claimed the ads initially were blocked due to “inaccurately enforced” policies.
Last year, Amazon also banned Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”
In response to a letter from four U.S. senators inquiring as to why Amazon had stopped selling Anderson’s book, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, responded, “We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson, however, notes that his book doesn’t characterize LGBTQ+ identities as a mental illness.
Meanwhile, while Anderson’s book is too dangerous, Amazon continues to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
And just like every other Big Tech company, Amazon never seems to censor or block leftists. Nor does it treat leftist books as too political to be classified as children’s books.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/27/amazon-targets-conservative-childrens-book-about-gender-identity
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‘Underhanded’: School Invites Students to Observe LGBTQ Day Without Parents’ Knowledge
Whether you know it or not, your child’s school may have observed a “Day of Silence” on behalf of the LGBTQ movement.
The advocacy group GLSEN invited schools across the country to hold a demonstration Friday to show support for LGBTQ students and their allies.
GLSEN encouraged participants to “take a vow of silence to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ people in schools,” according to the group’s website.
The Day of Silence would end, the group said, with participants holding “Breaking the Silence” rallies and events “to share their experiences during the protest and bring attention to ways their schools and communities can become more inclusive.”
One parent, whose son attends a private high school in Connecticut that has no religious affiliation, told The Daily Signal that her “suspicion” is that “a lot of schools, especially private schools, were participating in this.”
The mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son received an email from school administrators inviting students to wear rainbow colors last Friday and participate in a “Day of Action” to “support our LGBTQ+ community.”
The private school in Connecticut sent the email to students and faculty, but not to parents, the mother told The Daily Signal.
The email to students referenced “over 220 laws” that the school said targeted LGBTQ Americans this year, and included a link to a slideshow discussing some of the laws and the significance of the Day of Silence.
One slide tells students that “many states are trying to pass, or have passed, laws that prevent transgender youth from receiving gender affirming health care.” The slide adds that “gender affirming health care” includes “reversable puberty blockers and other hormone treatments” that “are shown to reduce transgender rates of suicide by 30%.”
Jay Richards, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says he believes that the only thing blocking the agenda of radical gender identity activists is “wide-awake parents.”
“Gender ideology is about dissolving the biological reality of male and female and replacing it with an entirely subjective notion of ‘gender identity’—which has no clear meaning or limiting principle,” Richards said in an email to The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.
“This isn’t just an abstract philosophical idea,” he said. “Gender ideology threatens the minds and bodies of students.”
The slides sent to students by the Connecticut school also address Florida’s new parental rights law, which opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. One slide states that critics argue that the law puts LGBTQ+ students at risk because it:
Affects the books students can read in elementary school, possibly prevents students with same-sex parents from talking about their families, creates the potential for teachers to be penalized or sued for classroom discussion, thereby stifling important conversations, [and] potentially prevents discussions of gender and sexuality beyond third grade.
The mother who spoke with The Daily SIgnal said she found it strange that her son’s school was putting such an emphasis on passage of a bill in Florida, because “these types of things are not being proposed in Connecticut.”
Emailing students an invitation to participate in a pro-LGBTQ rally, and sending them a slideshow with a political message without parents’ knowledge “seems underhanded to me,” the mother said, “especially if they’re going to ask kids to basically participate in … political engagement.”
She wonders whether administrators at her son’s school “would be equally willing to support student activism to protect girls sports for biological females,” the mother said.
“In Connecticut, our female student athletes are having to compete against boys. But I haven’t heard of any local schools engaging their student bodies to defend girls sports,” she said.
Parents are “waking up to a gender ideology that has been working its way into our schools and student curricula for years,” Heritage’s Richards said. “Those who thought the issue just involved accommodating a few kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes have had a rude awakening.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/27/underhanded-school-invites-students-to-observe-lgbtq-day-without-parents-knowledge/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 May, 2022
Why the Left Wants Twitter Over Tolstoy in Our Schools
If one leftist teachers group gets its way, reading literature in school will be replaced by reading internet memes and Twitter posts.
A powerful group of educators called the National Council of Teachers of English recently released a statement calling on schools to “decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”
But why? To more thoroughly push its leftist ideology, of course.
The statement goes on to support critical pedagogies, referring to Marxist ideas, a la critical race theory. It reads,
Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.
The left frequently attacks traditional educational strategies like reading classical literature as upholding white supremacy.
Founded in 1911, the National Council of Teachers of English boasts that it has 25,000 members across the country that receive its materials and recommendations. One English teacher in Massachusetts bragged about getting Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” removed from her school’s curriculum, while the journalists at NPR extoll listeners to “decolonize” their bookshelves.
The group goes full radical Marxist by saying kids should learn critical literacy and critical media literacy, dropping all pretense of neutrality. “Critical” here is a thinly veiled code for Marxist-style ideology.
For example, one recommendation reads that students should “examine the cultural, ideological, and sociolinguistic content of the curriculum and focus on the uses of literacy for social justice in marginalized and disenfranchised communities.”
Another recommendation pushes students to “examine mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies by analyzing relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.”
The rise of social media and increasing reliance the world has on technology represents an ever-evolving frontier in education. Kids today will need to be taught differently than generations that preceded them, and a focus on parsing online information should be included in a modern curriculum.
However, in their quest to eliminate any semblance of the old fact- and logic-based order, the left has decided that reading and writing must be sacrificed on the altar of memes and social media.
The council declares this in its statement when it says, “We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world. We experience this reality daily in the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds.”
But modern education shouldn’t be media literacy instead of classical literature, it should be media literacy and classical literature.
Authors from times past still offer valuable lessons and insight into the human condition, and as a society, we suffer enormously when we replace them with quick quips from Twitter.
Indeed, it’s our obsession with reducing messages to sound bites and 280-character tweets that’s part of the cause of today’s moral rot. Distilling strong values and lessons about what it means to be good people and good citizens is impossible under such conditions.
Literature takes effort and skill to unpack, but the value is immeasurable.
It’s also important to learn actual media literacy, not just the twisted social justice-oriented media literacy being pushed by the National Council of Teachers of English. Students should be able to tell when an outlet is lying or stretching the truth and be able to parse between opinion and fact.
By eliminating classical literature from our education system, the left hopes to fill the gap with dogma and propaganda. It hopes to weaponize yet another angle of scholastic life.
We’ve already seen the dire consequences of the radical left’s long march through the school system. Allowing it to destroy yet another bulwark of classical education leaves America one step closer to total leftist dominance. Literature helps to repel that invasion.
As “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
With those words in mind, it’s essential for kids to keep on reading.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/26/why-the-left-wants-twitter-over-tolstoy-in-our-schools/
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Clemson University backpedals
One of the most dangerous developments in recent years at college campuses has been universities setting up Star Chamber, Soviet-style, show trial procedures over complaints of sexual assault in which the universities deny basic and fundamental due process rights to accused students. That includes refusing to allow the students an opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, to question their accusers and cross-examine witnesses, or to be represented by a lawyer.
A South Carolina jury just awarded a Clemson University student, Andrew Pampu, $5.3 million for defamation and civil conspiracy by a female Clemson student, her boyfriend, and her father.
The university had suspended Pampu for a year after finding him guilty of sexual misconduct against Erin Wingo. To get to that finding, however, the university ignored multiple witnesses and text messages showing that Wingo had consensual sex with Pampu and manufactured a rape claim only after her boyfriend, Colin Gahagan, found out about it.
Pampu filed a lawsuit after he received a text message from Gahagan admitting that Pampu was innocent, that Gahagan had lied in the hearing, that Wingo “wanted to have sex that night,” and that Gahagan had deleted texts “from that night that prove she was f—— crazy.”
Clemson acted almost immediately to remove the disciplinary finding against Pampu and agreed to pay him $100,000, likely saving Clemson from an even bigger judgment against the university. Of course, if it had not ignored the exculpatory evidence in the first place and assumed Pampu was guilty, it would not have had to pay anything.
Unfortunately, the trend toward madness at the secondary education level is sure to increase if the Biden administration has its way with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
The Office for Management and Budget is reviewing a new rule on the 50-year-old statute that would expand Title IX’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination to “gender identity” discrimination, thereby upending women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in schools across the country.
In addition, the new Title IX rule would roll back the Trump administration’s Department of Education rule on campus sexual assault, which requires due process protections such as representation by counsel and the right to present exculpatory evidence and cross-examine witnesses, including the accuser.
This new rule once again would implement a “guilty until proven innocent” assumption, leading to more cases such as what happened to Pampu at Clemson.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/21/3-colleges-get-their-just-desserts/
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Georgia Governor Signs Bills to Banish Wokeness From Schools
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed seven education bills into law Thursday taking aim at wokeness in schools, including legislation that limits discussions about race in classrooms and transgender students’ ability to compete in women’s sports.
The bills included Georgia’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, or HB 1178, which “provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their student is being taught in school and protects the fundamental right of moms and dads across this state to direct the education of their child,” according to a press release.
Another bill, the Protect Students First Act, or HB 1084, prohibits “divisive concepts” such as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another race, the U.S. is fundamentally racist country, or that an individual, “by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or oppressive toward individuals of other races.”
The law also allows the state athletic association to pass a law prohibiting “students whose gender is male from participating in athletic events that are designated for students whose gender is female.”
“As the parents of three daughters, Marty and I want every young girl in this state to have every opportunity to succeed in the sport they love,” Kemp said in a statement. “That should not be controversial.”
Other signed bills will require the removal of obscene materials from school libraries, ensure transparency at school board meetings, double on the current donation cap for student scholarships, create a committee that will look at ways to ensure student financial literacy, and allow retired teachers to return to the classroom full time in areas with high demand.
“Unfortunately, there are those outside our state, and other members in the General Assembly, who chose partisan politics over commonsense reforms to put our students and our parents first,” Kemp said. “But standing up for the God-given potential of each and every child in our schools and protecting the teaching of freedom, liberty, opportunity, and the American dream in the classroom should not be controversial.”
“Making sure parents have the ultimate say in their child’s education should not be controversial,” he added.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/this-should-not-be-controversial-georgia-governor-signs-bills-to-banish-wokeness-from-schools/
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Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.
TERMINOLOGY: The English "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".
MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).
There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.
The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed
Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.
Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor
I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.
Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".
For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.
The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"
A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933
I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.
I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!
Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.
Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.
Comments above by John Ray
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“Learning only happens when students feel like they belong.”That is the vision according to the Oregon Episcopal School website. That’s right-Episcopal. In this new age of gender-awakening and fluidity, the Director of the school’s Center for Learning and Teaching, Asha Appel, is taking full advantage.The new push is “pronoun pins,” the latest stop on the road to inclusivity. Available to all OES employees, students, and their families, there are three pin messages: He-Him, She-Her, and They-Them—and they come in a handful of different colors. “OES teachers want students to know that their classrooms are spaces where students have voice and agency,” says Appel. “A teacher wearing a button declaring their own pronouns creates an inclusive classroom for kids who are working on their identity.By wearing a button, the teacher is saying ‘you can safely share your pronouns here.” ‘All-School Equity Coach’ Willow McCormick added the following : “If we are trying to create an atmosphere of belonging, where every child at OES feels seen, known, and accepted, then it’s the impetus on adults to set the tone and conditions for that sharing of self. What I’ve seen in other places is the burden falls to the student who doesn’t exist within the gender binary to educate all of the adults about who they are and that the gender spectrum exists.”With seemingly no hesitation or limitations, this training continues throughout academia as well all over our nation, many times with or without parental knowledge or consent, leading to a singular, sobering conclusion: this is more prevalent than most would dare consider, and more deeply rooted than most would dare believe. How did we get here?Changing DefinitionsIn 2004, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary listed the term, “Trans-gender” this way: “having personal characteristics(as transsexuality and transvestism) that transcend traditional gender boundaries and corresponding sexual norms.” Even then, the individuals cited were generally adults (and by and large male) who had made this decision as an adult, and rarely if at all, sought to change his sex. In addition, the Williams Institute records that only 0.6%, or about 1.4 million identified as such based on a 2016 report.However, something has changed.Within the last few years, a relatively new trend has begun; not just in our homes-but in our schools. An unprecedented surge in girls, not boys-questioning their sexuality, as well as their gender, and seeking to change it. This is being done in most cases, or in many cases, WITHOUT parental endorsement and assistance. This was predominately an area that had been long since dominated by males not females. Nevertheless, the encouragement and push urging questioning girls to become transgender men is at an all-time high. While this was once an anomaly-it is now by and large a well endorsed part of our social construct-and academia has clearly taken notice.https://theblacksphere.net/2022/05/transgender-infusion-takes-over-school-systems/***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************15 May, 2022Florida to Teach Students About Evils of Communism. Some on the Left Aren’t Happy About ItFlorida students will now learn about the evils of communist totalitarianism, thanks to the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis.DeSantis signed HB 395 into law on Monday, creating a “Victims of Communism Day” in which middle school students will receive at least 45 minutes of instruction every Nov. 7 on topics “such as Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, [Josef] Stalin and the Soviet system, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and Nicolas Maduro and the Chavismo movement.”It’s a remarkably positive step.Given the fact that the struggle against communism was the primary focus of American society and foreign policy for generations and that communism still threatens us today, isn’t it appropriate that high school students learn something about it?Not according to some on the modern left.University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato told me on Twitter that Florida’s initiative is just “political posturing.” Teaching high school students about the murderous regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, and other communists is “red baiting,” according to some in the media.If that’s “red baiting,” then what would you call teaching students about Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust? Surely, young Americans should know about that.A Miami Herald columnist, Fabiola Santiago, who is from Cuba, ranted that teaching a lesson about communism to students is itself just like communism.Interestingly, we didn’t get those same comparisons when California mandated a full semester on ethnic studies for students to graduate high school. Some of the people and groups who spearheaded that initiative and shaped the model curriculum were Marxists.Is it so ridiculous to set aside a single day each year—in a state with many refugees from communism—to talk about an ideology that has done so much harm in the world and has threatened to overthrow free societies around the globe?Yes, according to Jezebel, which actually went with the line that “true” communism hasn’t been tried yet.“For any impressionable Florida kids that may be reading this, please note that there have never been any ‘true’ communist countries, owing largely to violent intervention from the U.S. and other Western superpowers,” wrote Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung.It would have all worked if not for that pesky United States!Cheung also mocked the contention that communism has killed 100 million people. That’s some kind of right-wing fantasy pulled out of thin air, apparently.To the contrary, historian David Satter wrote in The Wall Street Journal that communist regimes have killed on an “industrial scale.”The numbers are staggering.“In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies,” Satter wrote. “This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics, and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.”When you count the victims not just of the Soviet Union, but of the various communist regimes it was linked to, “including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia,” Satter calculated, the number is about 100 million.Even apart from communism’s lethality is the destructive nature of communism on the living. The ideology destroys economies, strips citizens of basic rights, saps them of their spirit, deprives them of religion and faith, and reduces them to slavery in the name of equality.Just days after DeSantis signed the Florida legislation, Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen, a 90-year-old retired archbishop, was arrested by Chinese authorities for his support of democracy in Hong Kong.The evil of communism is still very much with us.Unfortunately, young Americans are woefully uninformed about communism and the Cold War. According to a poll conducted in 2016, about one-third of millennials thought that more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Stalin.More recent polls show that Gen Z is also generally ignorant about communism.One of the foundational reasons for publicly funded education in America is to cultivate self-governing citizens of a republic. Giving American students a basic understanding of the differences between a free society, like ours, and totalitarian societies is essential.How can they even understand our own country’s flaws if they have nothing to compare them against or to contextualize them?Students should learn about the history of slavery and racism in America. What the left-wing education establishment increasingly wants is to mandate teaching about those things to the exclusion of anything else.Even more, it wants to inject lessons in history and even science and math with warped ideology—such as critical race theory—that actually make us more racist and less free.Its initiatives create an extremely distorted picture of the United States.Throughout its history, America has been a symbol of liberty. In the 20th century, after a remarkable rise in power, it played an active role in opposition to totalitarianism on behalf of free people.First was the fight in World War II against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—the triumph of which would have created a new dark age.Next was the long, twilight struggle—as liberal President John F. Kennedy called it—against the Soviet Union and international Marxism. The goal of the Soviet Union, stated very plainly, was to bury the United States and free societies, to push Western civilization onto the ash heap of history.History, the communists claimed, was on their side. To make sure of that, they imprisoned political dissenters en masse, starved their own people, directly killed millions more, and waged war on those who resisted around the world.For a time, the United States was the only serious earthly counter to that threat. It was a symbol of hope for people living under the jackboot of fascism and communism.Countless people abroad who live under the most direct threat of oppression understand what we stand for, at the most fundamental level.Our own people should know that, too. Learning about communist tyranny and atrocities is a good place to start.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/12/florida-to-teach-students-about-evils-of-communism-some-on-the-left-arent-happy-about-it**********************************************Striving for ‘Menstrual Equity,’ Oregon Puts Tampons in Men’s Bathrooms at Public Schools, CollegesAccording to a new poll, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, is officially the least popular governor in America. And considering the law she just signed, it’s not hard to see why.Thanks to the Menstrual Dignity Act that just passed, local taxpayers are now on the hook for thousands of new tampon dispensers in boys’ bathrooms. This latest madness, which affects every public school and college in the state, is expected to cost up to $400 a machine. And school custodians aren’t the only ones upset about it.“This will show all of our youth, and especially our trans youth, that the bathroom they’re using, that affirms their gender, that it’s for them,” argued one Portland resident, “and it has the products there that they might need.”Legislators agreed, expanding a bill that was originally intended to give female students free sanitary products at school. Now, in an absurd gesture, the state has decided to “affirm the right to menstrual dignity for transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and two-spirit students” by trying to “minimize negative attention that could put them at risk of harm … during menstruation.”In the state’s guidance, school officials are told to use gender-neutral phrases like “menstruating students” instead of “girls.” When it comes to explaining the reproductive process, teachers are instructed to tell kids that “someone with a uterus and ovaries may begin to menstruate,” instead of girls. There’s no such thing as “female hygiene products,” the toolkit argues, only “menstrual products.”Obviously, state leaders didn’t bother to consult their counterparts in Illinois, where a similar move has literally opened the floodgates to expensive plumbing issues and mischief. “When you give a grade-school boy something that’s adhesive, they’re going to put it in places,” Illinois Republicans argued during their debate.“These products are not inexpensive, and they are going to be misused if they are placed in elementary school boys’ bathrooms,” Republican state Rep. Avery Bourne fumed last year.Case in point: campuses like Loyola University, where janitors are dealing with all kinds of pranks, tampering, and vandalism. Sanitary pads “would end up on the mirrors, in the sinks, down the toilet, and completely thrown out,” one students group complained.School administrators have also had to deal with the fallout of this lunacy in Illinois, admitting, “Operationally for our building, yes, it is creating problems … ” Huntley High Assistant Principal Tom Kempf said. “[T]he custodian has to spend an extra hour fixing something … ”What’s next? Urinals in the girls’ restrooms?“I’m telling you, there is no logic here,” Republican state Sen. Jil Tracy warned before the state ignored her and passed the bill. “We’ve got to quit playing these stupid silly games here and get real and get fiscally responsible.”Unfortunately, “menstrual equity” is only scratching the surface of outrage in most states, where parents are fighting a much more sinister abuse of their authority. In Florida, mom January Littlejohn is actually suing her school district for helping her teenage daughter transition without her consent.On “Fox & Friends,” she explained how she stumbled on a “transgender support plan” that school officials were working on behind Littlejohn’s back that included everything from preferred pronouns, overnight rooming situations for field trips, switching to boys’ restrooms, and other steps that they never called home to discuss.“This is happening all over the nation,” Littlejohn warned. “This same protocol is in place in many, many schools across districts everywhere … So this is a very systematic way that parents are being excluded from important decisions occurring with their children—and, further, social transition is a medical intervention that schools are grossly unqualified to be taking these steps without parental involvement.”Her attorney, Vernadette Broyles, pointed out that there’s a wave of lawsuits across the country from parents experiencing this same injustice. In places like Wisconsin, Maryland, Oregon, and California, she pointed out, moms and dads are starting to realize that “this is a national agenda … and they need to assert [their rights] with their school.”President Joe Biden’s radical education secretary, Miguel Cardona, has been on the receiving end of a lot of angry letters from Republicans who see the president’s administration—and woke districts across the country—”withholding information from parents … at an alarming pace.”Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., were furious that a 12-year-old girl attempted suicide after the school pushed her to embrace her new gender identity “without notifying the parents.”“There’s little to no accountability coming from this administration,” Foxx and Burr wrote to Cardona earlier this year. “How many more children will be put in harm’s way if school districts are not being held to account?”In places like Missouri, state leaders are racing to keep this dangerous ideology at arm’s length. Right now, local conservatives are working against the clock to move a bill that would outlaw this radical gender therapy (including hormones and surgery) for children out of the Rules Committee and onto to the floor. So far, it’s been stalled by one man—the committee’s chairman, Republican state Rep. Philip Christofanellihttps://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/04/striving-for-menstrual-equity-oregon-puts-tampons-in-mens-bathrooms-at-public-schools-colleges***********************************************Australia: Parents turned away as childcare centres don’t have enough staffQueensland’s childcare industry is being crippled by worker shortages with many centres forced to turn parents away due to regulatory child and staff ratios.The number of job vacancies in the early learning sector are at record highs across the country with one in 10 roles vacant nationally and 1371 in Queensland. Hiring difficulties are so dire fears grow that some centres will not survive and many have had to apply for a government waiver to legally operate as they have not enough staff.The Australian Childcare Alliance in Queensland is deeply concerned by the job crisis and has been lobbying all parties in the lead up to the Federal Election to recognise the need for strategies to attract workers to the sector and in the long run keep more mothers, who need childcare, in the workplace.“The workforce crisis in early childhood education has been on our radar for many years but this became even more of an issue during the pandemic when we had a significant number of educators leave our sector, either taking early retirement because they were simply exhausted, or due to vaccine mandates,” president of the ACA in Queensland Majella Fitzimmons said.The ACA has been working with members on the most effective ways to find new staff.“We highlight government programs for staff and businesses to support new entrants to the sector. There are some great packages and grants that bring new entrants to our sector and allow them to ‘earn while they learn’ through supported work placement programs,” Ms Fitzimmons said .The early education peak body believes the government needs to look at reduced fees for qualifications in this field, and a boost in Skilled Visa Immigrants.Lucy Schweizer Cook, general manager of a chain of Amaze early education centres across the state plus outside school hours care services, told The Courier-Mail that all but one of the Amaze centres are at capacity due to staff shortages.“Parents are on waiting lists until we can meet the ratios to enrol more children. During Covid a lot of educators had a life reboot with many deciding they would stay home rather than work or looking for jobs with higher wages. We are doing all we can to make things more attractive for workers. We give loads of bonuses, pay four per cent above award wages, have staff childcare discount, flexibility, free uniform,” she said.“It is such a rewarding career, who wouldn’t want hugs from babies and children every day,” she said.Under The National Quality Framework there must be one educator for four children under 24 months in child care settings, two to three year olds require one staff member for five children and in outside school hours care and vacation care one educator for 15 children.https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/parents-turned-away-as-childcare-centres-dont-have-enough-staff/news-story/54299fec1eec4ad3c6601e0bf8892833***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************13 May, 2022Exposing the Left’s Destructive Education Agenda: They’re ‘Coming for Your Children’Beginning with the 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia—in which Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe for all practical purposes vowed to keep parents out of the classroom, saying, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach”—parents began to realize the Democratic Party wanted to leave them behind.President Joe Biden echoed that sentiment April 27 while speaking to a group of Teachers of the Year, when he told them: “They’re all our children. … They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.”Politics aside, the issue at hand is protecting our children from radical ideologies and preserving a parent’s right to be a parent. But the left wants to have a stranglehold on education, to keep parents on the sidelines, and to force them to co-parent with the government, while driving a wedge between parent and child.When we push back on—and call out—those policies, its true motives are revealed.To see that displayed firsthand, look no further than Florida, where a former House colleague, Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently signed a bill to reinforce parents’ fundamental rights to make decisions regarding the upbringing of their children because parents should be able to send their first grader to school without worrying he or she will be taught radical sexual orientation and gender identity ideology.The “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which Democrats and the LGBT lobby falsely dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill simply prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, prohibits classroom instruction that is not age-appropriate for students, and requires school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.Florida’s new law exists to ensure parents’ rights and protect young children from being exposed to sexually explicit indoctrination, and contains nothing outside the realm of common sense, but the firestorm from the liberal media, Hollywood, leftists, and woke corporations like Disney (a company that profits from creating content for children) was astonishing.Just as an aside: Why has Disney shifted from founder Walt Disney’s vision of providing family-friendly entertainment to essentially being the lobbying arm for the left’s LGBT agenda?My question is: Do the opponents of the law really think children (ages 5 through 9) should receive sexually explicit instruction in school regarding sexual orientation and gender identity ideology and that parents should have no say in what goes on in the classroom?If the answer is yes, then we really do have reason to be concerned.Perhaps you remember the chilling lyrics of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ “parody” song that made waves last year: “You think that we’ll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked. Funny, just this once, you’re correct. We’ll convert your children—happens bit by bit, quietly and subtly, and you will barely notice it. … We’re coming for your children. … The gay agenda is here.”What’s scary is that the “coming for your children” song disguised as parody doesn’t seem as much of an outlier when you consider the left’s vitriolic reaction to the passage of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education law; a Disney executive producer’s admission of the company’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” released in a leaked video; the Biden administration’s push for mutilating “gender reassignment” surgeries and life-altering puberty blockers for minors; and the doxxing of the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account created to expose the degeneracy of predators and the horrors of the LGBT agenda by reposting content posted by the radicals themselves.The truth is, the Biden White House, liberal media, woke corporations, and Democratic elites are playing politics at the expense of children’s lives and well-being. Unfortunately, this is nothing new, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Democrats and teachers unions forced young children out of the classroom to protect them from a disease that poses little or no risk for healthy young people and kids.The number of children who have suffered mentally, physically, emotionally, and developmentally from the onslaught of these ineffective and unscientific COVID-19 policies is heartbreaking. But the left doesn’t seem to care.From unscientific social isolation measures and unproven mask mandates in schools to exposure to sexually explicit material in the classroom and a pro-abortion agenda, children suffer the most from the woke ideologies of the radical Democratic elites.We even see this with the Senate confirmation of federal Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Democrats—and some Republicans—hail her as a hero despite the fact that she has a long history of leniency in sentencing in child pornography cases. That should have raised a red flag on both sides of the aisle, not a speedy confirmation.Where does it stop for progressives when it comes to promoting their radical ideologies? It doesn’t. Give them an inch, and they will take a mile, all at the expense of those who deserve the most protection.The reality is this: Conservative policies are pro-child, pro-family, pro-parent, and most importantly, pro-life. Democrats, however, promote policies and ideologies that ultimately impair children in the long run, vilify concerned parents as “domestic terrorists,” and attack the most vulnerable.Conservatives believe that parents, not the government, should have the primary say in their child’s life and that a child’s rights must be protected first and foremost. For conservatives, when it comes to protecting children, that is the hill to die on.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/11/exposing-the-lefts-destructive-education-agenda-theyre-coming-for-your-children/*********************************************************The NY Legislature’s hostage-taking on mayoral control of schoolsWith bare weeks left in the legislative session, state lawmakers are torturing Mayor Eric Adams by holding hostage the renewal of mayoral control of the city’s public schools, now set to expire June 30.Chaos would ensue if the city actually had to re-establish the old Board of Education, potentially ousting Chancellor David Banks as the system’s boss and utterly derailing Adams’ and Banks’ efforts to repair the damage wrought in the de Blasio era, including all the ground lost during the pandemic.It’s far more likely the Legislature will do an extension of two or three years, while also undermining mayoral control by adding new strings. The only winner will be the school unions (whose power grows as accountability is diffused) and the lawmakers eager to take Adams down a peg.Meanwhile, it’s all just one more thing for parents to worry about. In a sane world, mayoral control would be permanent until lawmakers decided to replace it. But that would leave Albany powerbrokers less able to indulge themselves at the kids’ expense.This, when the Adams-Banks agenda is so promising: Lose the woke ideology, support and expand the parts of the system that work (the test-in-only specialized high schools and Gifted & Talented programs), prune the bureaucracy and increase accountability, do more for kids with learning disabilities such as dyslexia and return to phonics as a proven method of teaching children how to read.In a tell of who’s really calling the shots, Albany is aiming to demand smaller class sizes, requiring more teachers (the United Federation of Teachers’ perennial goal: more members) even as enrollment declines.State Senate Education Committee chief Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) also wants to dilute City Hall’s influence on the Panel for Education Policy by adding another parent representative and making City Comptroller Brad Lander (a relentlessly pandering de Blasio-style progressive likely hostile to the interests of Liu’s own constituents) an ex officio member.Mayor Adams held a rally with union leaders for mayoral accountability on the steps of City Hall on Monday, May 9.Mayor Adams held a rally with union leaders for mayoral control on the steps of City Hall on Monday, May 9.NYC Mayor's OfficeYes, Adams erred in failing to set up an effective Albany lobbying team, instead naively relying on the Legislature to simply do what’s right. As a former state senator, he should’ve known better. And relying on the weak reed of Gov. Kathy Hochul was another huge mistake.But the major blame belongs at the door of Liu, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bx.) and others in the city’s Albany delegation whose first loyalty is clearly with the special interests, not the families they supposedly represent.https://nypost.com/2022/05/12/ny-legislatures-obscene-hostage-taking-on-mayoral-control-of-schools/*****************************************************Australia: Seven surprising changes to the way Qld. children will be taught at school in 2023Students will be taught about tax and superannuation, Australia’s women’s movement, domestic violence and how to “make active choices” as part of a curriculum overhaul being rolled out next year.The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority on Tuesday unveiled its new “stripped back and teachable” curriculum coming in 2023.Mathematics and STEM programs were given a vast overhaul while English and physical education programs will have sweeping changes.A “Deep Time indigenous History” has been added to the curriculum as a compulsory component of Year 7.The new curriculum will include the rollout of “making active choices” lessons in classrooms to probe Australian students to strategise how they can increase physical activity in their day-to-day lives as well as reduce sedentary behaviour.The lessons around healthy choices regarding activity and inactivity will be introduced from Year 5 onwards.The changes come off the back of alarming data in recent years by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare which categorised 1 in 4 Aussie kids, 24 per cent, as being overweight or obese.Here are seven surprising additions to the curriculum you may have missed.Physical educationBy the end of Year 1, students will have explored how to seek, give or deny permission respectfully when sharing possessions or personal space.By the end of Year 8, students will examine how roles, levels of power and coercion and control within relationships can be influenced by gender stereotypes.By the end of Year 10, students will have investigated how gender equality and challenging assumptions about gender can prevent violence and abuse in relationships.HistoryBy the end of Year 7, history students will understand more about the early First Nations Australians, their social organisation, cultural practices and their continuity and change over time.By the end of Year 10, history students will have learnt about the significant events, individuals and groups in the women’s movement in Australia and how they have collectively changed the role and status of women.Business and social scienceBy the end of Year 8, students will be taught about the importance of Australia’s taxation system and how it affects decision-making by individuals and businesses.By the end of Year 10, students will have learnt about the importance of Australia’s superannuation system and how it affects consumer and financial decision-making.MathematicsLeading changes to mathematics and STEM, designed to prepare Aussie kids for the jobs of the future, was Year 1 students being taught to connect numbers to 20 – up from 10 – and order numbers 120, up from 100.Percentages will also be introduced at Year 5 instead of Year 6 and line graphs will be taught in Year 5 science classes instead of Year 10.But Year 1 kids will no longer learn to tell time on an analog clock, with fractions – including ‘time telling’ – pushed back to Year 2.EnglishUnder changes to the English components of the new curriculum, by the end of Year 10, students will no longer be required to “consolidate a personal handwriting style that is legible, fluent and automatic and supports writing for extended periods”.By the end of Year 4, students will understand past, present and future tenses and their impact on meaning in a sentence.https://www.couriermail.com.au/education-queensland/seven-surprising-changes-to-the-way-your-children-will-be-taught-at-school-in-2023/news-story/c936551616d0fd67f1a605e1c5844567***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************12 May, 2022Proposal Aims to Bolster Student Privacy in CaliforniaAt the beginning of the Covid pandemic, schools confronted new difficulties when they were tossed into remote learning due to prolonged lockdowns.Resorting to online classes, schools relied on obtrusive software to proctor online tests. State Senator Dr. Richard Pan is recently advancing with a proposed revision to California’s Business and Professions Code relating to student privacy. The California Student Test Taker Privacy Protection Act aims to curb the invasive surveillance of remote students by their schools.The proposal would direct schools to guarantee that their proctoring software minimizes unnecessary data collection of student information while also limiting the data’s retention and disclosure. Moreover, the Act gives students and their families the right to a private remedy if a proctoring software gathers data beyond what is needed to proctor the test.Despite the slow return to in-person classes, online tests remain, but the pernicious software should not. Not only does the use of what is effectively malware constitute both an attack on privacy and a potential network safety risk, schools have overlooked better alternatives. Schools all too often did not adopt sensible and effective strategies like remote proctors that record the live screen sharings of students or turning off settings that show the correctness or incorrectness of answers. Instead, schools drove straight into invasive surveillance.Some proctoring software monitors computer inputs, such as peripherals like monitors, mice, webcams, microphones, headphones, and USB, HDMI, DP, and Thunderbolt connections. Some access computer administrative controls, which opens up security vulnerabilities. Several proctoring services also possess and collect facial recognition and emotion detection, which scan other people in the environment. One vendor, which initially received notice for previous work with the Transportation Security Administration’s facial recognition efforts, uses an algorithm to monitor student behavior and categorize students as having high or low “integrity.”Beyond privacy and security concerns, the wide net cast by proctoring software is also the cause of needless interruptions for both students and teachers. One student reported that crying during an exam activated the cheating eye tracker, saying, “My French prof had to watch 45 min[utes] of me quietly sobbing.” Another student was reported to be unable to take a math class because the sound of his laptop fans triggered the proctoring software.https://blog.independent.org/2022/05/06/proposal-aims-to-bolster-student-privacy-in-california/?omhide=true*************************************************Elementary school teachers brag about ignoring parents' requests to refer to their children by their given names and pronounsElementary school staffers bragged about outright ignoring parents' requests to refer to their children by their given names and pronouns late last month, during a virtual panel that saw speakers refer to parents as 'caregivers.'The virtual 'Creating and Sustaining GSAs in Elementary Schools' meeting, held over Zoom April 26, saw moderator Katy Butler, a second grade public school teacher at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in San Francisco, poise a question to her fellow panelists concerning pronoun use when it comes to their students.The inquiry, sent to the group by another, unnamed educator, asked advice on how to deal with parents peeved over teachers' pronoun use.‘What should we do if a parent requests that we refer to their child by the pronouns associated with their sex assigned at birth instead of their preferred pronouns, and that we use a legal name instead of a student’s chosen name?' Butler - who panel organizers billed as a white queer cisgender female teacher on social media - read.Butler - the creator of Gender Inclusive Classrooms, the group that organized the panel - then gave way for the three other panelists, staffers at public schools across the country, to weigh in on the matter.One panelist, fellow cocreator Kieran Slattery, a fifth grade teacher in Massachusetts, proceeded to provide his advice on the matter - proudly revealing instances where he ignored parents' requests to call their child by certain pronouns.‘So, I can respond with something that I’ve done,’ Slattery, who teaches at Jackson Street Elementary, began.‘This came up for me - it’s come up in a couple different ways - but it’s come up for me where caregivers asked.'Slattery said: ‘I actually refer to their child’s name… using the name the name they asked to be referred to and their chosen pronouns, and caregivers reacted very strongly.'The teacher then detailed how parents 'followed up with me and the principal, and said, like, “I know you were using a different name than my child’s given name at birth and the pronouns we gave them, and I’m respectfully asking that you use the name and the pronouns that we gave them.”’Slattery - who panel organizers billed as a 'white, queer transgender man' - proceeded to warn the three other panelists of the legal concerns that come with rejecting parents' requests on how they refer to their children.‘So the laws in every state are different, obviously, and I can’t speak to the laws in everyone’s particular state, but I will say - again, the resources that we’ll give you after this have some helpful sites where you can look up what the rules are for your state,' the Northampton elementary school teacher said.'Before I responded to the caregiver, I made sure I ran it by my principal and my superintendent just to make sure that they had my back.'The transgender teacher then revealed how he rejected the request of one pair of parents - or as he called them, 'caregivers' - touting the slight as a victory.'And then I responded - and I chose my words carefully - and I said, “I hear you, I hear what you’re saying," Slattery said, adding that, 'I tried to really affirm what the caregiver was asking me, like in terms of, “I hear you saying that you’re feeling uncomfortable with me using the child’s preferred name and pronouns; I hear that you’re using different ones at home.'He continued: 'But here at school, the expectation is that all of my students feel comfortable and welcome in my classroom.’The assertion saw the educator put particular emphasis on the word 'my.'‘So, in my classroom, I will refer to your child by whatever name and pronouns that they’ve told me they feel most comfortable with,' Slattery then said, with his fellow panelists nodding in approval.The teacher went on to equate conveying that concept to parents to teaching children in his classroom.‘Just have that be it,' he said - 'almost like the guidelines I try to use when I’m, like, explaining hard topics to my students. Like, less is more.'The other panelists again nodded in approval.Slattery continued: ‘I just say, like, “That sounds like it works really well for you at home, and you can absolutely choose to do whatever you like at home.'In my classroom – and I even say, like, every year I start out my year by sending home information to caregivers that says, like, “Just so you know, this is an affirming class – the way that I affirm students is I call them by the names they ask to be called by and use their correct pronouns.'The teacher then reiterated how he denied the parents' request.'I just told them – maybe that’s not helpful – I just told them, “No,”' seemingly conceding the contentious nature of his assertion.‘Respectfully, no.’The assertion again garnered more impassioned nods from the other panelists.'And because I had my principal and my superintendent’s support, there wasn't much they can do,' Slattery then said.'And they eventually, kind of like, found another topic to squawk about,’ he added, before letting out a laugh.‘And they left that alone.’The remaining panelists all seemed to agree with the educator's assertion, with Butler in particular nodding affirmatively throughout her contemporary's spiel.Another panelist, 5th grade Spanish teacher Daniel Alonso, echoed Slattery's sentiments, describing a similar incident between him and a set of parents at Chavez Elementary in Yonkers, New York.‘Similarly to what Kieran said,' said Alonso, referring to Slattery, 'in my school district, LGBTQ+ students have a bill of rights - and the fourth one is that they have the right to be referred to by their gender pronouns and a name that fits their gender identity.‘And so, similarly, there was a situation where a parent felt that the school was not doing what they wanted them to do, and we – I don’t even know if we were respectful about it – we were just like, “No, sorry. Like, our district-wide rule is that the student determines that, not you,”' he said, while offering a smug smile.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10806755/Teachers-reveal-ignore-parents-requests-use-childrens-given-names-pronouns.html*****************************************************Confusion about Australia's Anglican [Episcopal] schoolsIn what sense is an Anglican school that rejects Anglican teaching in order to keep non-Anglican families happy still an Anglican school?That’s the question Sydney Anglicans are wrestling with as opposition to Christian teaching on sexuality and gender grows.The Sydney Morning Herald reported at the weekend that alumni and parents from Anglican schools had issued a letter complaining the Anglican church was ‘imposing its social conservatism on classrooms’.In other words, they were worried that the Anglican church was instructing Anglican schools to be, well, Anglican.Specifically, parents were upset about guidelines for schools on dealing with students struggling with gender identity.The Anglican Diocese of Sydney has advised its schools to show compassion, reject bullying and abuse, and note that nobody was immune from ‘brokenness’, but to also tell students to ‘honour and preserve the maleness or femaleness of the body God has given you’.All of which sounded a little too much like Anglicanism for Anglican school parents.‘I feel awful for any student who has to endure this senseless attack on their identity,’ a transgender woman (who identified as an Anglican parishioner) told the Sydney Morning Herald.Another parent told the Herald that most families at his daughter’s Anglican school were not religious, and that he worried ‘socially conservative’ forces were pushing the school ‘in a different direction’.By ‘socially conservative’ he presumably meant Anglican. And by ‘different direction’ he evidently meant Christian.If only those Anglicans wouldn’t be so Anglican, their Anglican school would be less Anglican so that non-Anglicans could enjoy it!Judging by the reported comments of disaffected parents, it will likely come as a surprise for them to learn that Anglican leaders don’t take their cues from Libs of TikTok.Church leaders base their doctrine on the teaching of Jesus who, among other things, told his followers: ‘Surely you have read in the Scriptures: When God made the world, He made them male and female.’Jesus’ words align with science, but not with the new-fangled gender transformation fetish.The Anglican Diocese has essentially reminded its Anglican schools – which include some of the most exclusive colleges in the country such as The Kings School and Abbotsleigh – that they are Anglican.Sydney Archbishop Kanishka Raffel said the guidelines:‘Emphasise care and compassion for those who experience gender dysphoria and give schools wide discretion to respond to individual situations while holding to a Christian view of the inherent goodness of our bodies, as each has been created by God.’But parents are threatening to withhold fees if the guidelines – including that school principals and board members must endorse the Christian view of marriage – are not rescinded.A gay parent whose daughter attends St Catherine’s asked: ‘How do you explain to a girl that the leader of your school is opposed to your way of being?’Imagine his surprise when he discovers there are literally hundreds of state schools in Sydney that endorse LGBTQ+ ways of being. And his daughter can attend any of them for free!Upset non-Anglican parents don’t want their children to go to non-Anglican schools. But nor do they want their children’s Anglican schools to be Anglican.So they are determined to leave their children in Anglican schools where they will oppose Anglicanism until the Anglican school is Anglican in name only such that it becomes a non-Anglican Anglican school.The angry parents have found some support among senior school staff.One Anglican school principal was said to be ‘livid’ at being asked to endorse the Christian view of marriage.Others said the requirement would reduce the already small pool of potential candidates for principals and compromise the quality of school leadership.A ‘high achieving woman with a public profile’ reportedly withdrew from the board of an exclusive Anglican school rather than sign a statement of faith endorsing the biblical view of marriage.The Herald reported this as a problem. I suspect the Sydney Anglican Diocese may view it differently. The statement of faith had the intended effect of weeding out a board member not committed to Anglican doctrine.The woman told the Herald: ‘It’s going to limit new principals – you’ll end up with a whole set of socially engineered principals across Anglican schools in the Sydney diocese.’If by ‘socially engineered principals’ she means Bible-believing Christians (can there be any other kind?) then she is right. And the Sydney Anglican Diocese, along with Anglican parents who sent their children to Anglican schools because they are Anglican, will be delighted.The woman continued: ‘Restrictive ideas about sexuality should not be tied up in the statement of faith and the fact that they are speaks to something deeply concerning about the Sydney Anglican Church right now. To me, this is not Christ-like.’I imagine Christ, who taught that marriage was between a man and a woman, would be greatly amused to hear that He is not Christ-like.The Sydney Anglican Diocese is not laughing.After all, what is an Anglican school if it is no longer Anglican? What value are grand sandstone buildings if they sit on nothing but cultural quicksand?https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/waiter-can-i-get-some-more-anglican-in-this-activism/***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************11 May, 2022Biden Says Kids Belong to Their TeachersSchools are becoming indoctrination factories, trying to turn children against their country and their own parents’ values. It’s what the teachers unions intend.Amazingly, that’s just fine with President Joe Biden, who told a gathering of teachers and union bigwigs on April 27 that the kids are “yours when they’re in the classroom.” That wasn’t just a Biden stumble. He repeated it for emphasis: “They are all our children …. They are not somebody else’s children.”Sorry, Joe. But parents have a right to know what their children are being taught, and to set limits. State legislators in at least 12 states have introduced bills requiring teachers to post teaching materials, including books and videos, on a website for parents to inspect before their kids see them.Good teachers will have no problem with that. But ideologically driven teachers, as well as the unions, are fighting back. That includes Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. As she launched Teacher Appreciation Week—and most teachers do deserve our appreciation—Weingarten smeared classroom transparency requests as the work of political “extremists.”Concerned parents are not political extremists, but Biden is joining the attack against transparency, parroting the unions. He and most Democrats in Congress are teachers union flunkies. Democrats delivered hundreds of billions in COVID relief to school districts, including $46 billion to teach critical race theory. By the way, that included $9 billion for CRT in New York schools.Biden also kowtowed to the unions to prolong school closings and masking, and then allowed the unions to dictate what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would require to reopen schools.As a candidate, Biden vowed to end federal support for charter schools, and his new regulations have that obvious intent—another obsequious gesture to the unions.Weingarten and National Education Association President Rebecca Pringle probably have more power in the Biden administration than any senator or cabinet member. That would be fine if they were wielding their clout to ensure children acquire strong reading and math skills. But that’s not their agenda.The American Federation of Teachers website shows the union is more committed to political activism than reading and STEM instruction. The site urges visitors to “take action” on student debt, voting rights and passing the Equality Act. But it never mentions that fewer than half of New York City’s third to eighth graders can read at grade level. Or that, overall, students in the U.S. rank behind many other countries in math. No call to action there.The AFT website also declares that the U.S. is facing health, economic and racial challenges “all made worse because of Donald Trump.” How can the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 entrust their children’s education to an organization so politically biased?Joining the unions to fight a parent’s right to know is none other than the Democratic Party. No surprise. The unions give 94 percent of their money to Democratic candidates and parties, according to data-tracking nonprofit Open Secrets.Tit for tat. Democrats are demonizing Republicans who support curriculum transparency. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) calls them “mean, hateful and spiteful.” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. says Republicans will be forced “to own the meanness.” Meanness for what? Keeping discussions of sex out of elementary school classrooms?Murphy lamely predicts Republicans backing curriculum transparency will lose because “it’s just not true that it’s popular to pick on gay kids. That’s a willful distortion.Truth is, no one advocates bullying gay kids. All children deserve kindness. But that doesn’t mean kindergarteners should be instructed in how boys can transition to become girls, or vice versa. Nearly half of teachers agree these issues don’t belong in the classroom, according to an Education Week poll.Biden often jokes that he sleeps with a teachers union member—the same one—every night: First Lady Jill Biden. Cute, but he shouldn’t sell out to the rest. Parents care more than anyone else about their own children. They should decide what schools teach, not the far-left ideologues running the teachers unions.https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-says-kids-belong-to-their-teachers_4448166.html*************************************************Men Drop Out of College But the Gender Pay Gap PersistsThe Wall Street Journal reports that three-fourths of the pandemic-driven college dropouts in the United States were men. These numbers would seem to depict a crisis for men that predicts lower future earning power. If the earnings for men are going down, does that mean the gender wage gap will close? For many reasons, the answer appears to be no. Kevin Carey of the New York Times explains some of the reasons why the gender wage gap persists -and why men in the United States, in general, are not in a pandemic-driven education crisis:The gender imbalance in college enrollment and graduation is not new. Carey notes that women’s enrollment in college surged during the 1970s, but “women have outnumbered men on campus since the late 1970s. . . . The numbers haven’t changed much in recent decades.”Male enrollment in public and private nonprofit four-year colleges dropped more from 2018 to 2019-before the pandemic-than from 2019 to 2020.The raw numbers do not take into account that some college degrees are worth more than others. For example, men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries.There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college degrees, but there are relatively few for women. Many female-dominated jobs don’t pay well. As women overcome obstacles and move into male-dominated fields, the pay usually goes down in those fields.Data reflects a class difference: students from higher socioeconomic classes are less likely to drop out of college.Last year, women were less likely than men to leave community college despite their disproportionate responsibility for caregiving and domestic work during the pandemic.There is structural admissions discrimination by selective colleges that do not want a gender imbalance in their enrollment. While women apply to colleges in larger numbers than men, their applications are often rejected to maintain a gender balance. Carey cites a dean of admissions at Kenyon College as saying, “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”Carey points out that the gender pay gap has been persistent despite the higher levels of enrollment and graduation from college by women for decades. Obviously, the problem is not just about whether or not you have a college degree. The problem is about societal attitudes about work and family, discriminatory policies and procedures that limit women’s access, and the lack of affordable childcare.Just today, my cousin called to tell me how surprised she was when a woman plumber showed up at her door today to fix a plumbing problem in her house. The fact that it is still so unusual to see a woman plumber says a lot about what we consider “women’s work” versus “men’s work.” We still have a long way to go to even this playing field.https://annelitwinphd.medium.com/men-drop-out-of-college-but-the-gender-pay-gap-persists-73eca8f2d645************************************************Texas Governor Calls for School Choice for Every Child in Lone Star StateThe image of Lucy yanking away the football from Charlie Brown has been invoked for years as a metaphor for Texas’ relationship with school choice.But is the Lone Star State finally about to connect?On Monday night, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on the Legislature to allow education dollars to follow children to learning options of their parents’ choice, including to private schools.“Empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school, or private school with state funding following the student,” the governor said, adding that school choice “is going to give all Texas children a better chance to succeed.”Abbott’s leadership on this important issue is a major, positive step for educational freedom in Texas. The state’s policymakers should now heed the call and establish universal education savings accounts for all Texas children.Every child should have the opportunity for a great K-12 experience—and the chance to succeed in school and in life. Education savings accounts can offer this on-demand education experience for children from all walks of life.The governor’s proposal has come at the right time.Parents are already signaling that assigned public schools are not meeting their children’s needs. Like state and school district officials around the country, the Texas Education Agency reported a marked decrease in public school enrollment statewide during the 2020-2021 school year.Curiously, while some districts, such as Fort Worth, are reporting historic enrollment decreases, others, such as Liberty Hill, northwest of Austin, saw sharp increases as families moved to more popular areas within the state.At the same time, the Texas Homeschool Coalition reports that the number of homeschooling families increased by almost 300% in 2021. That means Texans are watching a shift in how and where families choose to live and raise their families.Providing more education options to families couldn’t come a moment too soon. Just one-quarter of Texas eighth graders are proficient in reading, significantly lower than the national average.Among black and Hispanic students, the percentages who can read proficiently drops to 11% and 19%, respectively.Currently, fewer Texas students can read proficiently than could do so in the late 1990s. Mathematics outcomes don’t fare any better.Where district schooling has failed, education choice holds promise.Education choice improves academic achievement and attainment, increases access to safe schools, has positive fiscal effects, improves civic outcomes, and, critically, enables families to select learning environments that align with their values.It should come as no surprise, then, that school choice also increases parental satisfaction.The small but disproportionately vocal minority that still opposes education freedom in Texas is largely confined to the halls of the Texas Education Association, the state teachers union.Unions are out of step with Texas families, 74% of whom support education savings accounts. With an account, the state deposits a portion of a child’s funds from the state K-12 formula in a private account that parents use to buy education products and services.These accounts allow families to customize their child’s education by selecting textbooks and personal tutors, paying for private school tuition if they choose, and even saving money from year to year, to name just a few options.In fact, research from North Carolina found that more than 60% of participating families are using an account to access more than one learning option at the same time.For some parents and students, they may want a private school that aligns with their personal beliefs. Others may need an education therapist and individualized technology to help a child with special needs.Families across Arizona and Florida, along with children in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi, are using the accounts, and lawmakers in West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Indiana have approved proposals in recent years to create similar account options.Some have argued that school choice would be difficult for families living in rural areas of Texas. Yet, those concerns are overblown. Nearly 70% of Americans living in rural areas have a private school within 10 miles of their home, and 34% of those families have a private school within 5 miles of their home.Furthermore, supply is sure to meet demand once families can control their share of education funding. New schools will spring up and existing private schools may add additional campuses.Other claims that parents will misspend money have also been debunked by research. In Arizona, an auditor general’s report found that misspending amounted to just 1% of account funds—and some of this misspending was attributed to the state Department of Education’s poor guidance for families on allowable expenses.Officials in other states, such as North Carolina, have adopted new tools to help prevent inappropriate spending before it takes place.Texas is a popular destination for families looking to move, and state education trends are shifting. State officials should follow the governor’s lead and make Texas a popular destination not just for families looking for a new home, but also for more quality learning options.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/05/09/texas-governor-calls-for-school-choice-for-every-child-in-lone-star-state***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************10 May, 2022Kids’ book ‘Our Skin’ in NYC schools blames racism on white peopleIn a world gone mad, elites keep peddling untruthsAn “inflammatory” children’s book being distributed to New York City schools teaches kids as young as 2 that the concept of race was created by white people who claimed they were “better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else.”The book “Our Skin” was penned by Harlem activist Megan Madison and Brooklynite and library worker Jessica Ralli, and published last year. It begins with a simple discussion of skin tones — then launches into a screed that blames the idea of race on white people along with an illustration of scary-looking human skulls encased in glass and sitting on shelves.“A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else,” the book declares.It goes on to say “That isn’t true or fair at all!” with a picture of a “Caucasian” man holding up the “Most beautiful skull.”The book, aimed at those ages 2 to 5, has been distributed to at least one Manhattan kindergarten, one on Staten Island as well as a school in Brooklyn and appears to be part of the Department of Education’s new “Universal Mosaic Curriculum.” The DOE announced the plan under former Mayor de Blasio to standardize instructional materials and “better reflect” the system’s demographics. It is to begin in 2023.The tome is on a suggested reading list parents can access through the website TeachingBooks. It is part of the “Universal Mosaic Independent Reading Collections” for kindergartners created by the DOE’s Library Services, the site says.Brooklyn parent leader Vito LaBella called the text “inflammatory.”“That page alone in my mind is just preaching hate,” he said, referring to the text about sorting people by skin color.LaBella said at least one school in southwest Brooklyn’s District 20, where he’s a member of the Community Education Council, received the books. The principal had been told by former Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter they would be coming. They were to be delivered to kindergarten classes, but the principal was holding off, he added.“There were no instructions or curriculum guide with them,” said LaBella, who is seeking the Republican nod to challenge state Sen. Andrew Gounardes.He said he planned to discuss his concerns about the book at Wednesday’s CEC meeting.A Manhattan parent of a kindergartener saw the book in his son’s school this week in a box marked “Mosaic curriculum.”The dad said he looked through the book and stopped cold at the page saying white people invented race.“The book itself is fine and a lot of what is said in the book is productive and I think very helpful in a discussion of race,” he said. “However, there’s just an excerpt from it that I think is so damaging that it should disqualify the whole book.”He said he would address his concerns with the principal.“Racism should be talked about, but it should be talked about correctly,” he said. “I think that telling 5- and 6-year-olds that white people are all responsible for all racism is not helpful. It’s going to be very traumatic for many 5- and 6-year-olds who are going to blame themselves and blame their parents.”The book’s narrative adds that “racism is also the things people do and the unfair rules they make about race so that white people get more power.”There is no discussion that groups other than whites might be racist.https://nypost.com/2022/05/07/kids-book-our-skin-in-nyc-schools-blames-racism-on-whites/****************************************************The Left Finally Admits Remote Learning Was a Total FailureA newsletter from The New York Times breaks down the disastrous effects school closures had on kids during the pandemic sparked by the Wuhan coronavirus.When news of the virus first broke, schools were ultimately the first to close. And they tayed closed for nearly two years, causing kids to fall behind educationally and socially.According to a Harvard study, students lost on average the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning between 2020 and 2021.Even kids who went back to school in 2021 still lost about 20 percent of their typical math curriculum learning.Ultimately, the research found remote learning was the primary driver for these learning gaps. Evidence suggests that these problems were completely preventable.It is clear remote learning did more harm than good.Additionally, the article notes that many administrators could have recognized this as early as the fall of 2020.Fast forward to what we know now, children are at a very low risk of severe illness or death caused by the Wuhan coronavirus. Studies also show that in-school transmission between kids is extremely rare.According to The New York Times, the schools that did re-open early on did not see a substantial spread compared to schools that remained closed.An interesting take to point out is that low-poverty schools (many of which are run by Democratic officials) stayed closed longer than in Republican-run states. Evidence shows this is because Democrat-run districts were more likely to have unionized teachers advocating for remote learning.Research indicates that children in schools who did re-open earlier rather than later, thrived in and out of the classroom.Furthermore, two years of disruption from a normal routine, from being around peers, and from engaging with other kids proved to be catastrophic. The road to recovery for children’s social, mental and learning capabilities may difficult.https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/05/06/the-left-finally-admits-remote-learning-was-a-total-failure-n2606891*****************************************************Australian PM says schools not expelling gay students, doubles down on religious discrimination actPrime Minister Scott Morrison says gay students are not being expelled from religious schools, doubling down on re-introducing the failed religious discrimination act (RDA) without extra protections for gay and transgender students.The government attempted to pass the legislation earlier this year but shelved it after five of its own MPs crossed the floor to vote with Labor and the crossbench on amendments that bolstered the sex discrimination act (SDA) to give transgender students extra protections.Mr Morrison had promised extra protections for gay students to accompany his religious discrimination bill but has since walked back from the pledge.Today he said if the Coalition won government, he would introduce the religious discrimination act on its own and amend the sex discrimination act "sequentially"."We've been having this conversation for about the last four years, and on each occasion it has been presented that apparently students are being expelled each and every day, each and every week, or each and every year," Mr Morrison said.PM remains firm over religious discrimination billThe Prime Minister says a re-elected Coalition government would push ahead with its long-promised religious discrimination law without making changes to protect LGBTQI children at the same time."There is no evidence [of that] because the religious schools themselves don't wish to do that. They don't wish to do it. This is an issue that is actually not occurring in these schools."When pressed to reveal how much time there would be between the two bills, Mr Morrison would not specify. "They are different issues and that is my view," he said. "They're both important issues and the government's position is they'll be dealt with sequentially."Earlier this year, just before the legislation was introduced to parliament, a Brisbane school was criticised for sending a letter to parents demanding they sign a contract affirming students identify as their birth gender and that homosexuality was "sinful".The contract was withdrawn a few days later after backlash from parents and the wider community.At the time, the Prime Minister said he did not support the controversial contract and reiterated his promise to protect gay children from discrimination.Moderate Liberals want the government to pursue the religious discrimination act and changes to the sex discrimination act at the same time to protect vulnerable students.Labor leader Anthony Albanese today pointed to a letter in which Mr Morrison promised to protect gay students at the same time. "I'm astonished he has walked away from that," Mr Albanese said. "We need to protect people from discrimination, whether its religious discrimination or on the basis of sexuality."If people don't think some young people are discriminated against and vilified, then that just does not reflect reality."While being questioned by journalists today, Mr Morrison took aim at Labor for not supporting the legislation in its original form, rather than admitting his own party was split on the issue."I'm quite determined," Mr Morrison said. "People have learnt that about me. I don't give up on things. "I had hoped to pursue these issues in a bipartisan way. I'd very much hoped to do that. "But the issue was hijacked and the outcome was thwarted … it was hijacked by the Labor Party and the crossbench."The Prime Minister was asked if he thought the moderate Liberal MPs who crossed the floor had changed their minds, or if he had written them off because they were under threat in their seats from independents and Labor."The issues that they were addressing were not related to the religious discrimination act; they were related to the sexual discrimination act, and we should be able to see those, we should be able to pursue them sequentially, as we set out," Mr Morrison said. "That's the government's policy. There's no change to the government's view here."Moderate Liberal MP Katie Allen, who was one of the five Liberals who crossed the floor earlier this year, today would not rule out doing the same again, if there was no protection for gay and transgender students. "I will be very clear: I have a very strong view on this and I will not be changing my position," she said. "I believe that you can protect religious freedom and protect gay and trans students at the same time.""That's the thing about political negotiations, it is always a negotiation and I will stick with my position, because I believe in the protection of gay and trans students."Federal Labor supports new religious discrimination laws but Mr Albanese has not given a specific time frame for any accompanying protections for gay and transgender students.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-08/scott-morrison-says-schools-not-expelling-gay-students/101047808***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************9 May, 2022UK: Oxbridge discriminating against grammar schools 'could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic pupils', warns education thinktank<i> Grammar schools are State-funded selective schools<.i>Britain's leading universities have been warned not to discriminate against grammar schools as it could unfairly impact black and minority ethnic youngsters.The warning comes after the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, Professor Stephen Toope, faced accusations of ‘social engineering’ for saying that enrolling more grammar school pupils would not help to widen ‘participation goals’.Canadian-born Professor Toope told the Times Education Commission: ‘We have to keep making it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people from independent schools.’Now, the head of a respected think-tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI), has waded into the row. Research from HEPI has shown that grammar schools send more ethnic minorities students to Cambridge than all other state schools in the country combined.It also indicated that children from the most disadvantaged 20 per cent of households are more than twice as likely to get an Oxbridge place if they live in an area with grammar schools.HEPI’s chairman, Nick Hillman, said: ‘If Oxbridge sets limits on grammar school recruitment, we may see the number of UK students with minority ethnic backgrounds drop.’Dr Mark Fenton, chief executive of the Grammar School Heads Association, said: ‘Professor Toope should also be aware that in counties with a wholly selective system, virtually all the most academic students attend selective schools regardless of social background. If Cambridge was to reduce admissions from grammar schools, this would be manifestly unfair on large swathes of the country.’Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi said: ‘Grammar schools are a valuable part of our system, and universities must have a fair, transparent application process. Discriminating against a child because of their background or which school they went to is never acceptable.’Mr Zahawi added: ‘I am proud we have more 18-year-olds from disadvantaged backgrounds at university than ever before and I want a system that continues to equip those students with the skills and knowledge they need to progress, whether to a top-tier university, an apprenticeship or the world of work.’A Cambridge University spokesman said: ‘We do not discriminate against any applicant. If society is serious about offering opportunities to everyone, universities like ours need to reach beyond traditional recruiting grounds to very talented pupils who wouldn’t necessarily have considered applying.’https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10793175/Thinktank-Oxbridge-discriminating-against-grammar-schools-unfairly-impact-black-pupils.html************************************************Adams, Banks face a huge task in forcing NYC schools to focus on teaching all kids to readReading is fundamental — or so you might think. But, as The Post’s Cayla Bamberger reported last week, parents and education advocates across the city are demanding that the Department of Education do more to help all students learn how to read.In 2019 (the last full pre-COVID school year), less than half of all Grades 3-8 students were proficient in reading. Then the debacle of remote learning set back all kids, leaving Mayor Eric Adams and Chancellor David Banks a lot of damage to undo.Adams’ own struggle with long-undiagnosed dyslexia informs his approach: His budget plan earmarks $7.4 million for dyslexia screening and support programs, plus launching two new schools for students with reading disabilities in Harlem and The Bronx.Banks, meanwhile, wants to rethink the DOE’s approach to literacy by stressing phonics at an earlier age. That’s a huge win for kids and common sense over the ideologues who dominate the education establishment.Sadly, that includes the State Education Department and Board of Regents, who in recent years have focused on dropping standards across the board to conceal rather than heal the system’s failings. That’s produced rising high-school graduation rates even as remote learning left all too many kids actually learning far less.The SED’s new “alternative pathways to graduation” serve to confer diplomas on functional illiterates. Teens (especially ones with learning disabilities) get steered into paths where the system doesn’t have to address their problems learning to read.Since they’re disproportionately minority kids, it’s a kind of racial segregation — the very sort of “inequity” that such progressives supposedly despise.Adams is spot-on when he laments that the DOE’s $37 billion a year in taxpayer money isn’t buying a whole lot of learning success for the great majority of city students, especially black and Hispanic ones, who don’t perform at grade level in reading or math.There’s no greater social-justice cause than helping poor and minority students learn to read. It’s a shame the mayor and chancellor need to fight not only the DOE’s inertia and the misbegotten policies of the last mayor but also the state education authorities as well as the ideologues and special interests who’d rather cover up the injustice than truly confront it.https://nypost.com/2022/05/08/nyc-schools-face-a-huge-task-by-teaching-all-kids-to-read/************************************************Australia: Activists masquerading as educatorsThe recent news from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) that fewer and fewer students are choosing to study higher mathematics at Secondary school is yet another black mark against our education system.Unfortunately, things are hardly better in Literature.Victoria, which leads the way in progressive education, has seen students ditching literature in their droves. Over the last three years, the subject has dropped outside of the top 20 VCE subjects, with students preferring to study arguably less useful subjects such as ‘Food and Technology’ and ‘Media’.This isn’t surprising given that the VCE’s booklist for literature in 2022 is heavily weighted toward modern texts that reveal a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with Marxism, Identity Politics, and Critical Race Theory. One-third of all texts on offer were published within the last 20 years, neglecting the remaining 5,000 years’ worth of literary history.Students should be reading books by world-renowned authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. Instead, they are reading about ‘power, gender, and obsession’ in Jeanette Winterson’s racy novel The Passion. Oscar Wilde is overlooked in favour of Shelagh Delaney’s exploration of ‘sexuality, homophobia, and racism’ in her production A Taste of Honey. Then there is Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home from the Wars that challenges ‘binary understandings of power’. Books like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which plumbs the depths of the human condition, have been replaced with Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise denouncing the ‘abuses of capitalism’.When great books manage to make the cut, they are taught through an ideological lens. For instance, students studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will look at the ‘obsessions of Georgian England’ and the ‘emergence of consumer culture’. In Tim Winton’s non-fiction work The Boy Behind the Curtain, ‘colonisation, capitalism, and politics’ are emphasised as key themes alongside ‘masculinity, gender, and family’.Literature should not be used to send a political message to students. When learning is replaced with ideology, it undermines education. The study of literature should be about teaching students to think critically, not indoctrinating them with a progressive worldview.Australian literature is notably absent from the 2022 VCE booklist.While one-third of the texts were written by Australians, only half were actually set in Australia and the majority of these were poems. This reflects a dubious trend in education in which the idea of a global identity is promoted while the idea of an Australian identity is actively questioned.Students should be reading classics like The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, or one of Banjo Paterson’s famous poems. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which looks at the birth of a distinctly Australian identity in the lead-up to Federation, also deserves to be on the list. Even films such as Ladies in Black are of value because they address the rich cultural impact of immigration from Europe in the wake of the second world war. These works are all listed on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australian Cannon and are classic pieces of literature that construct a vivid picture of the Australian way of life.The problem is far greater than the booklist itself. Activists masquerading as educators have infiltrated Australian schools. They have successfully been destroying the pre-existing model of education and imposing their own. The choice of texts in this year’s booklist for Victorian students is an undisguised exercise in social engineering which robs students of their cultural heritage.Victorians are being sold short.Students from Queensland and New South Wales will read many of the great books missing from Victoria’s VCE program. For instance, the QCE literature booklist offers texts like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Queensland students have a much broader range of top-quality works that does not include pointed summaries pushing a progressive agenda like in Victoria. The New South Wales HSC English program, which also involves the study of literature, looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Short Stories by Henry Lawson, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This comes after a concerted effort in New South Wales to overhaul the Year 11 and 12 English syllabuses to include more ‘classic’ texts in 2017.The solution for Victoria is simple. Give students the opportunity to read works of substance that look at the universal human experience rather than focusing solely on the issues faced by minority groups. More students would study literature if more classics with relatable life lessons were on the booklist, as is the case in New South Wales and Queensland.https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/activists-masquerading-as-educators/***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************8 May, 2022How Randi Weingarten is actually undermining trust in public schoolsIn Randi Weingarten’s florid telling, far-right activists are resorting to unchecked propaganda and “Big Lies” to mislead parents, undermine trust in teachers and financially cripple public schools in hope of replacing them with a universal, unregulated voucher system. In a breathless essay for Time magazine, Weingarten, head of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, blames “dark money-funded extremists” for an orchestrated campaign to weaken public education, “undermining our democracy and further eroding America’s middle class.”In New York, we call this chutzpah.American Federation of Teachers chief Weingarten has ample reason to be concerned about the decline in trust in America’s public schools, which have lost more than 1 million students in the past two years. But no one bears greater responsibility for that hemorrhage than Weingarten herself.My AEI colleague Nat Malkus just released an exhaustive set of student-enrollment data covering the vast majority of US public-school systems. It shows that nearly 1.2 million children exited public-school systems in the 2020-21 school year, including more than 80,000 in New York City.This year some districts recovered while others continued to shrink. The difference was not due to a right-wing campaign to undermine public schools, as Weingarten claims. It was how those districts responded to COVID.Districts that returned to in-person instruction more quickly have seen enrollment recover; those that stayed remote the longest continued to lose students. “I thought we’d see a relationship with in-person learning, but I didn’t think it would be this strong,” Malkus notes.If Weingarten wants to talk “Big Lies,” there’s none bigger than her own bald-faced lie, repeated endlessly in interviews and on social media, that she “worked to reopen schools safely since April 2020.”Never mind that the union’s affiliate in Washington, DC (enrollment down 4% since the 2019-20 school year), held a sickout strike to stop schools from reopening. Never mind that the AFT’s affiliate in Chicago (down 7%) claimed demands to reopen schools were “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Never mind that the union in Los Angeles (down 9%) insisted “reopening safely” included union demands for a moratorium on charter schools, wealth taxes and Medicare for All.Never mind that Weingarten noisily insisted that she wanted kids back in school even while lobbying the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention behind the scenes to slow-walk a return to full-time, in-person instruction.The full cost of this calamity is becoming clear. A Harvard study released Thursday concluded that shifts to remote or “hybrid” instruction during 2020-21 had “profound consequences for student achievement,” especially for those attending high-poverty schools, where they were “a primary driver of widening achievement gaps.” The report ominously concluded: “If the achievement losses become permanent, there will be major implications for future earnings, racial equity and income inequality, especially in states where remote instruction was common.”I’m not unsympathetic to Weingarten calling out the rhetorical excesses of conservative activists and culture warriors. But she’s doing public education and teachers no favors with her refusal to take parent discontent over critical race theory and gender ideology in schools seriously, attributing it to disinformation and saying almost blithely that “this is how wars start.”Her new “Big Lie” is painting a picture of parents as mere dupes of extremists and ideologues, which she claimed in a recent interview is a “base vote strategy” by Republicans.Weingarten is either misreading the moment or in deep denial. For decades, polls have consistently shown Americans trust Democrats to do a better job on education than Republicans. But a new NPR/Marist poll finds parents with children under 18 in their households — those with the clearest view and skin in the game — now favor Republicans over Democrats for Congress by an almost a two-to-one margin: 60% to 32%.Teachers, too, have good reason to be concerned about Weingarten’s tin ear and habit of stepping on rakes. For nearly half a century, Gallup’s “honesty and ethics” survey has shown grade-school teachers among the most trusted professionals. At the pandemic’s start in 2020, trust in teachers had jumped to 75%. Today, it’s 64%: still strong but a troubling all-time low.As long as a majority of our children attend traditional public schools, it’s in the interest of every American for them to perform well and to be trusted by parents. For reasons known only to her, Weingarten appears determined to drive faith in public education into the ground.https://nypost.com/2022/05/05/how-randi-weingarten-is-actually-undermining-trust-in-public-schools/****************************************************Parent groups react to Biden admin's upcoming Title IX changes: 'Blurring and in effect erasing women'Parent groups predicted the Biden administration's upcoming changes to Title IX sex discrimination rules would spell danger for students.Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos written that Title IX’s sex-based protections were sticking by the definitions of "biological sex, male or female." However, in March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order outlining plans to review Title IX regulations related to gender identity. The administration's reforms include rolling back some due process protections put in place by the Trump administration, and changing the definition of "sex" to include "gender identity."Twenty-seven parents' rights organizations claiming to represent almost 400,000 members across the country recently sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging him to heed their concerns about the changes. Many agreed that those alterations could threaten student safety."We represent parents, grandparents, and concerned citizens across the country who are worried that the forthcoming rule changes are a politicized effort to placate activists," the organizations, spearheaded by Parents Defending Education, wrote in a letter to Cardona on Tuesday. "In fact, the sweeping changes to Title IX that you are reportedly set to announce would erode the very rights that protect all students – regardless of sex – and ensure a safe and equitable learning environment."Several of the signatories expanded on their concerns in exclusive interviews with Fox News Digital."We see that this idea of identifying students in general by identity than by biological is concerning to us," Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice told Fox News Digital. "We’re seeing sexual harassment claims, or harassment claims as language is violence, being used by students who accidentally misgender a child in the classroom. Sometimes genders are fluid. Instances where a child was being told to kill themselves and being bullied by a group of students who were literally changing their gender every day and then the school was looking at harassment violations or harassment claims against that child, which was not the case. These are 11-year-olds."Miguel Cardona speaks after President-Elect Joe Biden announced his nomination for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware.Miguel Cardona speaks after President-Elect Joe Biden announced his nomination for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020 in Wilmington, Delaware. (Joshua Roberts)"We don’t see any reasons why it needs to be changed," she continued. "We think it really is the erasure of women in general. And as mothers we are women, adult human females, who are not birthing people.""We want to protect women’s rights," she concluded. "We believe the Biden administration is blurring and in effect erasing women in a lot of different ways."Elicia Brand, Army of Parents president and co-founder, similarly said the main reason that her group signed on to the letter was to safeguard female students."Title IX under Obama, and now under Biden, is being twisted and used as a weapon against girls and women, that Title IX was actually written to protect us. And we will suffer the most, particularly our girls who are in sports."We don’t want this to be weaponized under Biden while his executive order doesn’t carry the full weight of the law as Trump’s did," she continued. "It is still very dangerous because it gives the Department of Education the ability to bring lawsuits against schools and in that way they have to comply because they can’t lose the money. So the people that will be suffering will be girls and women."The 1972 Congress, she added, likely had "no idea" that Title IX would be "manipulated to expand from just sex to gender identity."Local father Benjamin Orr credited the original Title IX language with opening opportunities for his kids, especially for his daughter. Those opportunities were available not just in athletics, he said, but also in the form of academic scholarships."When you look at Title IX, it ensures that there’s equity between the sexes for anything related to educational purposes, whether that’s resources, scholarships, or athletics, of course," Orr told Fox News Digital. "And when you change this rule to make it about gender identity, which really can’t be defined…it just opens the door for potential abuse and changes.""This is really kind of that tipping point that just kind of opens the floodgates to further interpretation, further understanding, and it’s a gray area, there’s no black and white perspective here on right versus wrong," mother Dawn Lang agreed.Ashley Jacobs, Executive Director and cofounder of Parents Unite, another signatory, also suggested that the reforms would negative impacts both in terms of restroom safety and athletics."And it’s an issue because it has everything to do with bathrooms and dorms, and sports teams," she added. "Athletics we can go into that too. If you’re a lacrosse goalie, for example, on a girls’ team and a person who identifies as a girl and is going against you in lacrosse, which is a pretty brutal sport to begin with.I mean there are just physical differences and we’ve acknowledged that I think mostly. But it’s complicated, and so we just felt that, you know in K-12 this is such a complicated issue, and we’re making it harder, I think, to let schools do what’s best for them, for their students, and we’re making it harder for parents to do what’s best for their kids."https://www.foxnews.com/media/parent-groups-react-to-biden-administrations-upcoming-title-ix-changes***********************************************Making Sense of the Student Loan ScamToday’s college students often complain about skyrocketing tuition, and they rightly blame those same higher-ed institutions for saddling them with debt. After all, many of them are now the proud owners of bachelor’s degrees that cost more than $100,000, and they’re bussing tables at a local bar to chip away at the balance.But in defense of these predatory schools, they merely took advantage of a student loan scam put into place by the very same politicians claiming to be on their side today. That’s why these debt-strapped students shouldn’t be marching against college administrators. Instead, they should be pounding on the doors of Democrats in Washington.Colleges know that every single undergraduate student walking through their doors is guaranteed more than $50,000 in federal loans, with graduate students able to borrow nearly $140,000. Unsurprisingly, then, tuition rates have soared as this corrupt cycle keeps repeating itself: More loans enable higher tuition, which enables more loans, which enables higher tuition. Now, some Democrats are floating the awful idea (again) of forgiving up to $50,000 of student loan debt.The Biden administration, however, recently suggested a number closer to $10,000, while adding that loan relief would be limited to those borrowers making less than $125,000.The idea that the president can simply wipe out student debt is a fantasy, mainly designed to give false hope to young voters whom they hope will be motivated to vote “D” on November 8. But polls currently show that Biden is losing this key demographic.That’s why Biden is pitching the false idea that he can wipe out student debt on his own. Not even Biden’s own Department of Education believes he has the authority to do so, nor does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Even if Biden tries, he faces many obstacles. For example, as The Washington Times reports, “Mr. Biden hasn’t publicly confirmed that pledge, but acting unilaterally to cancel student loans would stir division within the Democratic Party, invoke Republican opposition and likely face legal challenges.” The Wall Street Journal details some of these legal concerns, but suffice it to say, the Journal notes even Barack Obama’s former top Education Department lawyer says Biden “would be on shaky legal ground.”To push it over the finish line, the Democrats are — surprise! — making it about race by claiming that alleviating student debt will help black and Hispanic students, as well as boosting the economy and helping the working class. But according to The Wall Street Journal, “The borrowers Democrats really want to help are white-collar workers with advanced degrees who account for 56% of the $1.6 trillion in federal student debt.”Regardless of whether Biden actually pulls this off, what might a future Republican Congress do about student debt? As political analyst Charles C.W. Cooke suggests: “The first step for the GOP to take would be ending the student-loan program completely. Given the obvious political temptations that program was always going to create, the federal government should never have gotten into the student-loan business in the first place. But it did, and so here we are.”Good point. And a Republican Congress and president should apply the same principle to countless other government programs that need to be put on the chopping block. Cooke adds, “If President Biden goes through with his threat, we will have been shown once and for all that the government cannot be trusted to issue these loans on behalf of America’s taxpayers, and that it must not be allowed to do so again.”Of course, Republicans have held the reins of power before and failed to fix things, so one wonders what they’d do if given another chance. For now, Democrats are proposing an outrageous plan that lets some college students off the hook while insulting others who worked hard to pay back their loans in good faith. Oh, and it makes inflation worse.There’s another group of Americans, though, that’s largely ignored in this conversation about student loan forgiveness: the millions who didn’t go to college. Should their taxes go to fund such an ill-conceived giveaway?On a reassuring note, the nearly 60-year-old student loan scheme is another textbook case of the failure of progressivism. Next time those on the Left propose another government program, we can remind them of this and other failures.https://patriotpost.us/articles/88165-making-sense-of-the-student-loan-scam-2022-05-06***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************6 May, 2022University of South Carolina blasted over 'White Student Accountability' meetingThe University of South Carolina is being criticized by a conservative student organization over a "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted at the school.An email sent to University of South Carolina College of Social Work students invited them to attend the "White Student Accountability Group" meeting that was hosted on April 26, according to the conservative student organization Turning Point USA.According to the event description for the "White Student Accountability Group," participants would learn about their "responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives.""The purpose of engaging in this project is three-fold:1) To help social work students recognize both their contribution to and responsibility to dismantle racism in our practice and everyday lives,2) To encourage students to use their voice, power, and privilege to enact change in their classrooms, community, and practice,3) To support students in developing skills to host similar groups among peers or colleagues to expand the community dedicated to racial equity and justice," the reported event description states.A University of South Carolina Spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the "White Student Accountability Group" was part of a student's project and was not officially sponsored by the College of Social Work."The Accountability Group was part of a student’s project and was not part of an officially sponsored College of Social Work activity. The meeting was open to everyone and was strictly voluntarily," the spokesperson said.Several universities across America have "White Accountability Groups," such as Loyola University Maryland and the University of North Texas.Several faculty members from the University of South Carolina College of Social Work signed a statement, posted on the school's website, "in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and the Black community who persevere through the reality of oppression on a daily basis…""As part of our pledge of solidarity, we recognize white privilege and silence contributes to the horrific racial inequities and we commit to fostering growth of our critical consciousness so that we cease to be complicit in the persecution of the Black community," the statement continues. "In our view, the indifference of color-blindness is ineffective in supporting anti-racism and ameliorating white supremacy. Education must stand as an institution of anti-racist action, grounded in the recognition that no one is free and equal until the violence and discrimination perpetrated on the Black community is dismantled."https://www.foxnews.com/us/university-south-carolina-blasted-over-white-student-accountability-meeting****************************************************Oregon's 'Menstrual Dignity Act' requires schools to place feminine products in boys' bathroomsOregon public schools will be required to provide feminine products along with instructions on "how to use" those products in all K-12 bathrooms regardless of gender, in accordance with the state's "Menstrual Dignity Act" signed into law last year.The controversial mandate, solidified by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, was set to go into full effect during the 2022-2023 school year. A 2021 statement from Portland Public Schools detailed how the act would be implemented long-term."Starting next year (2022-2023), products will be available in all restrooms (male, female and all-gender) in every PPS building where education occurs," the statement read."To ensure timely compliance, PPS ordered 500 dispensers. Dispensers have been installed in all elementary and middle school girls' restrooms, and more will be installed in all remaining bathrooms, including boys' restrooms, next year."Instructions on how to use tampons and pads will be posted in all bathrooms," the source added.The statement also stressed the need for students to learn about growth and development, noted that some physical education courses are implementing lessons on "the four pillars of Menstrual Dignity" and encouraged parents to have similar discussions with their children to help reduce the "shame and stigma" surrounding menstruation.The Oregon Department of Education also doubled down on the controversial content by issuing a "Menstrual Dignity for Students" toolkit in March, complete with instructions on how to use menstrual products, segments on faculty and staff training, classroom instruction and tips for "menstruation-positive" language for families.The toolkit also emphasized the need for menstrual products in all bathrooms because lack of access disproportionately impacts "students of color, students experiencing disabilities, and students experiencing poverty.""Importantly, [the Menstrual Dignity Act] affirms the right to menstrual dignity for transgender, intersex, nonbinary, and two spirit students by addressing the challenges that some students have managing menstruation while minimizing negative attention that could put them at risk of harm and navigating experiences of gender dysphoria during menstruation," a segment of the introduction read."Research also connects gender-affirming bathroom access to supporting student safety at school," the toolkit said.Republicans outraged by the bill spoke out on the measure. Gubernatorial candidate Bridget Barton slammed Brown for the policy, as well as her stance on abortion, in a statement to Fox News Digital."Radical leftist woke policies are destroying Oregon from our streets to our businesses to our schools. But as a mom, a new grandmother, and a Republican candidate for Oregon governor, I can't believe we're even discussing this -- America's most unpopular governor, Kate Brown, is putting free tampons in the boys bathrooms of Oregon's elementary schools."Clearly Brown cares more about what's going on in the bathrooms than what's going on in the classrooms," she said.Barton noted another policy flaw among the state's education system, saying that Oregon's students rank 46th in the nation in reading and math after Brown revoked allegedly "racist" academic requirements."We’re at the bottom of the barrel and the career politicians spend our taxpayer money on tampons for little boys," she said. "I'm respectful of all, but it's fair to let little boys be little boys, and little girls be little girls. Instead, leftist education bureaucrats are pushing this radical nonsense, spending precious class time coming between Oregon parents and their kids, creating activist factories instead of strong community schools."Oregon's kids deserve so much better from their schools; right now Oregon's public schools don't deserve our kids."Barton said she is running to "put a stop" to these leftist policies and to better education in her state.https://www.foxnews.com/media/oregons-menstrual-dignity-act-requires-schools-place-feminine-products-boys-bathrooms************************************************NY Times newsletter breaks down ruinous school closures: 'Remote learning was a failure'A New York Times newsletter broke down the negative effects of school closures Thursday and affirmed what many believed to be true during the pandemic: "Remote learning was a failure."The New York Times' David Leonhardt outlined the learning loss experienced by students who stayed home for remote learning in 2020 and 2021. "On average, they lost the equivalent of about 50 percent of a typical school year’s math learning during the study’s two-year window," he wrote.He noted that keeping schools closed throughout the pandemic made "economic and racial inequality in learning" much worse."Low-income students, as well as Black and Latino students, fell further behind over the past two years, relative to students who are high-income, white or Asian," the newsletter said."Were many of these problems avoidable? The evidence suggests that they were," Leonhardt wrote, adding that remote learning did more harm than good. "Many school administrators probably could have recognized as much by the fall of 2020."Unfortunately, many left-leaning officials appeared to only change course on remote learning following the omicron outbreak in winter 2021-22.New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait wrote in January that the progressive left likely was starting to notice that school closures throughout the pandemic were a "catastrophic mistake.""Many liberals are complaining that the recent debates over short-term closings are creating a hysterical overreaction from people still angry about the 2020-21 school shutdown," Chait wrote. "Perhaps a first step to building trust that we are not planning to repeat a catastrophic mistake is to admit the mistake in the first place."Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (ATF), was criticized Wednesday for a lack of self-awareness with regard to teachers unions and their role in keeping schools shuttered throughout the pandemic.Weingarten, who lobbied for years to delay the reopening of schools, said this week, "Our kids are in crisis … for two years of disruption, two years of looking at the screens, two years of not having a normal kind of routine and rhythm, recovery is really tough."A 2020 New York Times op-ed admitted that former president Donald Trump was "right" about keeping schools open."Some things are true even though President Trump says them," Nicholas Kristof wrote at the time. "Trump has been demanding for months that schools reopen, and on that he seems to have been largely right. Schools, especially elementary schools, do not appear to have been major sources of coronavirus transmission, and remote learning is proving to be a catastrophe for many low-income children."Still, the Chicago Teachers Union defied their city's order to return to in-person instruction in early January 2022 amid an uptick in omicron cases, which prompted a lot of backlash, even from liberals.Even Mayor Lori Lightfoot came out against the union and threatened to withhold pay from teachers.https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-newsletter-breaks-down-ruinous-school-closures***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************5 May, 2022University of California Suicide WatchIt seems determined to end the university’s preeminence.Californians have long prided themselves on having one of the world’s premier public universities, in addition to great private schools like Stanford and Cal Tech. Forbes ranks the University of California at Berkeley as the best college in America and places three other UC schools (UCLA, San Diego, and Davis) among the top 20. U.S. News & World Report ranks the UC schools a bit lower, but both UCLA and Berkeley are in its top 25—ahead of the State University of New York (SUNY), the University of Texas, and all other state universities.UC and state officials now seem determined to end the university’s preeminence by declaring war on academic excellence. Great universities like Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford have one overriding goal: to maximize the quantity and quality of the knowledge they create and disseminate. Great schools strive for the best, brightest, and most diligent students and faculty, allowing them to achieve superior outcomes.For several years, however, the UC system—whose 10 campuses enrolled nearly 295,000 students this past fall—has been backing away from its commitment to excellence. In 2020, for example, the UC Board of Regents voted to drop the required SAT or ACT admissions test, despite a faculty committee’s recommendation to continue requiring it for undergraduate admission because it provides valuable information that enables UC to select highly qualified students. While many schools dropped the college readiness tests during the COVID pandemic, top schools, such as MIT and Georgia Tech—seeking to attract future science and technology leaders—have started reinstating them. As MIT’s admissions dean explained, “our ability to accurately predict student academic success ... is significantly improved by considering standardized testing.” Because of grade inflation and the abysmal quality of some high schools, grades alone are often a woefully inadequate predictor of collegiate success.An even greater threat to UC’s academic integrity comes from the current attempt to require freshman applicants to complete an “ethnic studies” course in high school—though many high schools don’t offer such courses. Proposed guidelines for the ethnic studies classes suggested they “should create and honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements that struggle for social justice on global and local levels.” They argue students should learn about “systems of power and oppression,” such as “white supremacy” and “anti-Blackness.” In short, if you want to attend the University of California you must be indoctrinated in a racialist ideology that many—I dare say most—Americans believe is fundamentally wrong. As a letter signed by more than 100 UC faculty put it, “The university should never be in the position of forcing a particular political agenda upon its own students—let alone UC applicants across the state and the nation.”A larger group of nearly 2,000 UC faculty, students, and community members also condemned the proposal, saying it would “incite bigotry and hatred in California classrooms, particularly against Jewish ... students,” pointing to the anti-Israel and anti-Zionism comments of some of the proposal’s advocates.Perhaps more outrageous in a democracy is the fact that a small group of individuals associated with the University of California is trying to force its ideology on high schools, whose curriculum is normally, and properly, set by state and local school boards.It is arguably appropriate for governmental authorities to mandate that graduates of publicly supported high schools study, for example, algebra; geometry; English, American, and world history; and some science before receiving their diplomas. Such requirements can help ensure that high school graduates are at least minimally knowledgeable about important things all adults should know. But imposing an ideology that deliberately denigrates Americans of European descent, and the extraordinary accomplishments of our nation, is not only wrong but despicable.As someone who for years ranked colleges for a major magazine, I confidently predict that if the University of California continues its denigration of academic standards and its mandatory woke indoctrination of students, it will soon fall from its academic perch, and California high schoolers who can’t get into, or afford, one of the Golden State’s leading private schools will look to attend college at out-of-state institutions where traditional standards still apply.The net result will be an acceleration of the already worrisome out-migration from California.https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14161***************************************************Australia: Struggling school students to be blocked from teaching degreesAs 15,000 angry NSW teachers marched in the streets demanding pay rises of up to 7.5 per cent on Wednesday, the federal government announced $40m in extra funding to recruit hundreds more engineers, lawyers, tech experts and tradies into classrooms.Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said 700 more mid-career professionals would be retrained through the Teach for Australia program, to enter classrooms next year and in 2024 if the Coalition were re-elected.He said he was concerned that at least a quarter of maths teachers in Australia were not qualified to teach the subject, and that one in 10 university graduates in education courses were failing the literacy and numeracy test that was required to graduate.Mr Robert said his 12-year-old son had been able to answer some of the maths questions that 10 per cent of university graduates got wrong. “I was reading out example questions to our sons at the weekend and my boys were answering them,’’ he said.“The test is designed for the top 30 per cent of (school leavers) and we can’t have the people looking to teach our students failing it.’’Sample questions include: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’Many of the literacy questions are multiple choice, to check comprehension and identify spelling errors.Mr Robert said a re-elected Morrison government would seek consensus from the states and territories to mandate that students pass the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students (LANTITE) as a condition of starting their university degree.Under existing arrangements, undergraduate teachers can sit the test at any time during their degree, but cannot graduate until they pass. But Mr Robert said university education faculties should only enrol students who had already passed the test.“Ten per cent of our teaching graduates are failing on basic literacy and numeracy,’’ he said. “Ten per cent (of those) are failing it not once, not twice, but three times.’’Mr Robert also announced $13.4m to change teacher accreditation standards, to halve the time it takes mid-career professionals with a university degree to retrain as school teachers.The federal government would need state and territory approval to change the graduate diploma of education from two years to one.Mr Robert said two years of retraining was a barrier for workers wanting to switch careers into teaching.“One year to learn the pedagogy of teaching at university is enough,’’ he said. “You could get a whole bunch of older tradies who aren’t on the tools anymore to do a one-year graduate diploma and teach industrial art (in schools).’’A re-elected Morrison government would also fund 60 workers to retrain as teachers through La Trobe University’s Nexus program, which combines a Master of Teaching with part-time work as “paraprofessional teachers’’ in hard-to-staff schools in Victoria.And $10.8m would be spent to develop new micro-credentials to upskill existing teachers in teaching reading through phonics, explicit teaching methods, and managing disruptive students.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/struggling-school-students-to-be-blocked-from-teaching-degrees/news-story/726bcd0ae1f415af0e9d6daa57466e88***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************4 May, 2022Children told to stop eating HAM SANDWICHES in ridiculous 'warning' note sent home to parents in school newslettersPrimary school students have been urged to 'ditch the ham sandwich' in leaflets inserted in their newsletters and send home to parents.Leaflets from the Cancer Council telling kids to stop eating ham sandwiches have been put into public school newsletters by teachers in NSW.'Ditch the ham sandwich' is the Cancer Council's latest anti-meat edict and follows on from a previous leaflet telling children to have a 'meat-free Monday'.But both parents and pork producers have defended the humble ham sandwich and railed against the 'politically correct message'.However, Channel Nine's U.S. correspondent, Amelia Adams, admitted she 'wasn't surprised'. 'It's such a nanny state back there,' she told Karl Stefanovic during a Today show cross on Tuesday morning.A pork company owner said the Cancer Council leaflets go 'too far'.'Ham is actually a product which has been developed over the last 5,000 years and people have eaten it through the ages without any problems,' David Bligh of Bringelly Pork and Bacon told News Corp.'I think sometimes these politically correct messages can go a little bit too far and not be as practical as they should be.'A Cancer Council spokeswoman said the leaflets are part of a health campaign to get children eating better food.'Because there is strong evidence that eating processed meats and too much red meat is associated with increased risk of bowel cancer, our cancer prevention messages advise everyone to limit their processed meat consumption and cut down on red meat,' she said.She added that schools sent the messages to include with material sent home with pupils, were not under any obligation to do so.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10775019/School-children-told-meat-free-Monday-pork-industry-blasts-woke-vegan-edict.html**********************************************The dangerous rise of academic diversity quotasWho should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated. Once rare, diversity statements have become ubiquitous in the announcements for new positions. The demand is worded in various ways, but this job announcement for a cosmologist at Cornell University represents the diversity statement’s typical form:Also required is a statement of diversity, equity and inclusion describing the applicants [sic] efforts and aspirations to promote equity, inclusion and diversity through teaching, research and service.If an applicant is puzzled by this circular logic, a university may supply guidance, couched in New Age neologisms and platitudes. UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offers this gem:“Mindful Transparent Judgment” (MTJ) embraces the simultaneous messiness and virtue of our discretion. Uncabined discretion coupled with the presumption that we are already objective and fair leave us [sic] susceptible to implicit biases and structural norms that undermine equity, diversity, and inclusion. But mechanical adherence to pre-defined rules and processes set us up for a different sort of failure. In lieu of either extreme, MTJ challenges us to thoughtfully cabin and transparently employ discretion.Don’t worry, this says to the applicant, we have no idea what we mean either; we just want to let a hundred flowers bloom. Soothing phrases, like “celebrate,” “vibrant communities,” “inclusive excellence,” and “lively interest,” are sprinkled about like beautiful flowers. The more discerning applicant will see the evasive lawyer-speak that is masking the actual message: your application will be judged by conformity to our de facto hiring quota. Universities naturally deny any such thing, of course. They have no choice: racial and gender quotas are illegal. But the quotas are there, well hidden within the details of the faculty search process.Paranoid much? Canadian universities, which operate under different standards of law, are quite open about their diversity quotas: white men literally need not apply for a position as one of Canada’s 2,000 prestigious Research Chairs. Exclusion, not inclusion, is revealed as the agenda of the academy’s new overlords. Give Canada credit at least for honesty. In the US, stealthy subversion will be the instrument for depriving the sciences of mastery of their professions. Their target is the faculty search.A faculty search has traditionally been a complex minuet between a university administration and its faculty. Both parties are obliged to participate in the dance. Faculty have possession of the precious jewels without which administrations cannot exist: no student applies, nor does any academic strive, to join a university for the prestige of its administrators. In their turn, administrations covet the jewels and want to control them. The traditional faculty search is intended to balance these disparate interests, and for decades it worked pretty well, with both faculty and administrators left to tend their own gardens in peace. No more. The new managerial class (let us call them diversicrats) has become the instrument whereby the faculty can finally be dispossessed of those coveted jewels.Here is how the takeover works: a job search starts with an ad hoc search committee that seeks qualified applicants. The search committee reviews applications, winnows the field down to a few individuals to be brought in for interviews, then crafts a recommendation to the administration for making a formal job offer.A search committee traditionally comprises faculty capable of judging a candidate’s qualifications and suitability. For a position in cosmology, for example, the search committee will empanel a number of physicists whose professional opinion should carry great weight. A representative from the university’s human resources office also usually has a seat, to ensure compliance to employment law, and to guard against members of the search committee asking stupid or illegal questions during interviews.In the new regime, a “diversity officer,” appointed by the university’s diversity administrator (usually someone with vice-presidential rank), now sits on the search committee. The diversity officer conveys to the committee the diversity vice-president’s wishes, and reports back how closely the committee is conforming to those demands. The diversity vice-president can then veto or reconstruct the short list of candidates invited for interviews, or even dissolve or repopulate the search committee to produce a conformed outcome.To add an air of objectivity, search committees may be provided a rubric for carrying out the new diversity litmus test. From San Jose State University’s rubric, for example, high marks accrue for attention to “ethnic, socioeconomic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and cultural differences” (my emphasis). Low marks are given for speaking of “diversity in vague terms” (what kind of diversity?) or not understanding the “personal challenges that underrepresented individuals face in academia” (how is one supposed to do that?). A candidate with too independent an opinion, or who declines to genuflect to the diversity agenda, can kiss his prospects goodbye.The diversity rubric has an interesting pedigree. The San Jose State University rubric borrows considerably from UC Berkeley’s rubric, which was adopted for the entire University of California system. Cornell University, Emory University, Brandeis University, University of Michigan, and many others have adopted identical, or very similar, discriminatory tests for candidates. The irony is hard to miss. Diversity rubrics bear an eerie similarity to the supposedly objective literacy tests of Jim Crow (e.g., Louisiana’s). The intent is the same: only the target differs.The common language of these proliferating rubrics prompts the question: do they have a common ancestor? Grinnell College (probably inadvertently) points to the answer. Grinnell belongs to the Liberal Arts Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance (LACRELA), a consortium of fifty-one member colleges that coordinate and establish diversity and equity policies. The LACRELA, in turn, is part of the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center (USCREC), which, for a healthy fee, will advise colleges and universities (as well as schools and businesses) on their diversity shortcomings, including formulating rubrics for evaluating diversity statements. Which prompts an additional question: who funds the USCREC? The answer can be found on the USCREC’s homepage: a who’s-who list of wealthy donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies…and the US Department of Education.So, scientists? Do you still think you’re in control of your profession? Or do you see that the faculty search been reduced to a Potemkin façade, behind which your profession is being stolen from you? When will you decide to take control back?I have another question. If discrimination on the basis of race, gender, and sexual proclivity is illegal, what is one to make of the vast ball of collusion of wealthy donors, government agencies, and university administrations that has built up to promote illegal discrimination? Isn’t this the definition of conspiracy?I will give the last word to Grinnell College. The self-celebratory webpage of Grinnell’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion states that their studentsbring varied geographic, ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic experiences to Grinnell — but their common traits far outweigh their differences.Thus, my final question. If “common traits far outweigh their differences,” why should hiring new faculty be geared so strongly to amplifying those differences? Just asking.https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-dangerous-rise-of-academic-diversity-quotas/****************************************************Pa.: Once Exemplary College Muzzles SpeechIt’s hardly news today when a college prioritizes wokeness and political correctness over genuine intellectual inquiry and a steadfast commitment to the free exchange of ideas. It is news, however, when a college takes aim at one of the few remaining parts of academia that is truly outstanding and emphatically worth preserving. Such is the case at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the hometown of Arnold Palmer and Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers fame).On April 7 through 9, St. Vincent’s Center for Political and Economic Thought, impressively built and shepherded over the past 22 years through the diligent efforts of Professor Brad Watson, hosted what was without exaggeration one of the finest academic conferences that one could hope to find anywhere in America.The Center—whose advisory board includes (among others) Robbie George, Wilfred McClay, and Charles Kesler—invited nine speakers to its annual Culture and Policy Conference, which this year was entitled “Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis.” Due to Covid restrictions, it was the first time that the usually annual Culture and Policy Conference had been hosted since 2019–and also the first time since Father Paul Taylor became St. Vincent College’s president. Taylor would quickly prove the aptness of the word “panic” in the conference’s title.The conference featured one compelling presentation after another, all of which are now posted online. It was a rich opportunity for students to hear viewpoints outside of the academic mainstream so dominated by the groupthink Left. Scott Atlas, Jeffrey Tucker, Wilfred Reilly, and I all gave presentations on the ill-advised response to Covid, during which scientific knowledge and centuries of Western norms were often abandoned in favor of costly and coercive lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements. Allison Stanger talked about Big Tech and the threat it poses to our republic. David Azerrad discussed the tension between racial preferences and colorblind justice. Keith Whitaker gave an interesting and nuanced account of the history of financial panics and what they tell us about human nature. Johnny Burtka offered students helpful advice gleaned from great books. And Jacob Howland capped things off by talking about how our “crisis of logos”—our decreasing willingness, or ability, to engage in meaningful discussions about the great questions of our day, or any day—requires our full attention and commitment to reverse.As if on cue, St. Vincent’s administration promptly confirmed this crisis of logos. After a few of the many students who had attended Azerrad’s talk complained about it, President Taylor and his administration initially censored the publication not only of the video of Azerrad’s presentation but also of the videos of the other eight conference presentations as well, as Howland recounted for City Journal. After being pressured by national organizations that fight for freedom of speech, the administration subsequently relented on posting the videos. But then it promptly took aim at the Center that Watson has built, giving every indication that the administration is determined to make this the final such free-flowing Culture and Policy Conference that St. Vincent College will ever allow.President Taylor released a letter on April 19 saying that in order to “protect the diversity of opinion critical to our students’ educational growth,” only “responsible opinion” will henceforth be allowed to be expressed at St. Vincent. The judges of “responsible opinion” will not be serious scholars like Watson but rather the college president and his administrative cabinet. Taylor writes, “The President and Cabinet members will now approve all sponsored speakers.”What’s more, the Center that Watson built and Taylor merely inherited was forced to undergo immediate “structural changes” so that it now “reports directly” to Jeff Mallory, the school’s Chief Operating Officer. Until he was hired by Taylor, Mallory was working as the Assistant Vice President for Diversity, Inclusion, and Student Advancement at Duquesne. This is how one kills an academic center without formally removing its scholarly head.The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) says that Taylor’s new policy “could be the most extreme example of guest speaker censorship that FIRE has seen in its more-than-20-year history.” FIRE calls the policy “a brazen violation of Saint Vincent’s binding commitments to free expression and academic freedom.” Those “principles,” as the group wrote in a letter to Taylor on April 22, “bar administrators like yourself from usurping student and faculty rights to decide which views are welcome on campus.” FIRE asserts that St. Vincent’s new policy “could also jeopardize its accreditation.”A college spokesman claimed in the wake of Taylor’s letter that the administration “will not institute prior censorship of a speaker’s remarks.” Note that the remarks could still be reviewed, however, and even if the remarks were not censored, the speaker could still be disapproved—thereby providing censorship via other means. It’s hard to see how Taylor and company could otherwise have kept someone like Azerrad from speaking—their clear goal—given that his status as an assistant professor at Hillsdale College surely clears the bar for scholarly credibility.So, what was so objectionable about Professor Azerrad’s presentation that it could be said to justify effectively torpedoing a decades-old center that has been an academic jewel? In his letter, Taylor claims that Azerrad’s remarks were “inconsistent with the fundamental mission of the College,” which “centers around the inherent belief that only when we lift up human dignity can we move the world forward.” Since Azerrad apparently failed this fuzzy test, Taylor says, “I . . . denounce this lecture and am sorry that this happened at Saint Vincent.” Taylor adds that students and faculty should “be inspired to search for truth,” but only if that search will “lift up human dignity.” If the latter condition is not met, then the search for truth apparently must yield. A college that genuinely understands its mission would be embarrassed to suggest that a significant tension exists between the search for truth and the fostering of dignity.More insight into the administration’s specific objections to Azerrad’s remarks shows up in a statement edited by Mallory and released on April 13 above the signature of Dean Gary Quinlivan. That statement says that the college opposes “any point of view which may be interpreted as a form of invidious discrimination which inherently degrades the sanctity of human life.” This doesn’t remotely characterize Azerrad’s actual remarks, and it is hard to imagine how anyone who listened to them could claim otherwise. (Azerrad’s remarks, as well as the rest of the presentations, are available online.)The Quinlivan statement also speaks of “systemic bigotry” and implicitly accuses Azerrad of such, even though Azerrad lamented in his remarks that “we were de facto [a society] of white supremacy for most of our history”—a claim he said would be “silly” and “foolish” to deny. And the Quinlivan statement specifically objects to Azerrad’s having “downplayed and minimized the role of several highly accomplished African Americans,” such as George Washington Carver and Kamala Harris, whom Azerrad said “would not be vice president of the United States of America today” had her father not been black.I agree with Quinlivan that Azerrad was too hard on Carver. Saying, “If he were not black, no one in America today would know who George Washington Carver is,” as Azerrad did, misses the point that a key aspect of what distinguished Carver—who was winning prominent awards before World War II, in an era that was hardly woke—was his rise from slavery to college and then to scientific prominence, despite having been denied a relationship with either of his parents and having faced undeniable prejudice. Nevertheless, Azerrad’s statement is hardly a capital offense. Indeed, if this was the most objectionable comment across some seven hours of presentations by nine speakers, why is President Taylor so intent on wresting control of the Center, or at least of its flagship conference, away from Professor Watson?As for Vice President Harris, President Biden made it crystal clear that he was limiting his search to a woman, and Representative James Clyburn, to whom Biden effectively owed his nomination, made it almost equally clear that he was pushing Biden to pick a black woman. Most people would presumably agree with Azerrad that Harris, whose presidential campaign did not even survive until—let alone beyond—Iowa, would not have been picked had she not fit the “correct” demographic profile. In any event, Azerrad’s expressed opinion hardly “degrades the sanctity of human life,” the crime of which he apparently stands accused.Taylor, who also released a message condemning “racism” in the wake of Azerrad’s talk, further opined that Azerrad’s remarks “did a disservice to Fred Rogers, for whom the building in which the speech was given was named.” This may seem an odd statement, but it makes more sense in the context that most of us delivered our presentations within a stone’s throw of the room in which Rogers’s actual sweaters, shoes, and puppets are on display. As a childhood fan of Rogers’s endearing show, I’ll go along with Taylor’s line of thought and take a shot at what Rogers might actually have thought. I suspect that the kindly Rogers, who seemed to value every last person as an individual child of God, would have applauded Azerrad’s courage in presenting heterodox views to a somewhat hostile crowd, likely would have admired the crispness and analytical rigor of his arguments, might have wished he had employed a bit more pathos and a bit less provocation, and likely would have appreciated the compelling words with which Azerrad concluded his remarks:“The choice before the country, it seems to me, is clear. We either develop the stomach for colorblindness, treating everyone equally under the law, not discriminating, being polite to one another in the private sector—all are equal in America, come what may of the outcomes—or we decide to tear down our civilization in this mad quest to achieve equal racial outcomes by granting unfair privileges to some.”Azerrad’s presentation was pretty much an embrace of treating members of every race equally and a rejection of affirmative action, broadly construed, which he argued is counterproductive for everyday Americans of any race—no matter how much establishment elites may love it. This is a view that many, perhaps even most, Americans share. The fact that St. Vincent’s administration would find this so intolerable says a lot about the university’s level of toleration.Even more so, the notion that St. Vincent’s administration would view this extraordinary conference, when taken as a whole, as having detracted more than it added to the college and to its students’ experience, is incredible. It shows evidence of a college in serious trouble and perhaps beyond repair. The sad thing is that, until what seems like yesterday, St. Vincent College had been one of the few places left in all of American academia that had featured anything genuinely worth celebrating and preserving.Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans enjoy extraordinary freedom of speech as a matter of law but often limit their speech as a matter of practice, due to the power of public opinion in a democratic society. But the modern-day Left is on a mission to shrink the range of acceptable opinion (“responsible opinion”) to a degree that even the prescient Tocqueville could only have imagined. What’s different from Tocqueville’s day is that the Left’s suppression of speech isn’t majoritarian but authoritarian. It doesn’t represent tyranny of the majority but rather tyranny of the minority. It actually defies the majority in two ways: by insisting that people shouldn’t be allowed to say what they think, even if they hold views shared by a majority of their fellow citizens; and by rejecting the majority’s view that free speech is not only valuable but essential.St. Vincent College’s actions are the latest example of this larger phenomenon. Whether the college gets away with it—and the battle is not yet over—will say a lot about the state of free speech and academic freedom in America today.https://www.city-journal.org/st-vincent-college-takes-aim-at-academic-freedom?***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************3 May, 2022I’m a Full-Time Working Mom. Here’s Why I Love Homeschooling My DaughterAny working mom can attest that work never quite turns off. We don’t necessarily get to sleep in on the weekends or kick back and sip wine when we get home from our jobs.Most likely, we’re cooking dinner, giving baths, refereeing fights, negotiating on bedtime or television, reading stories, and trying to accomplish the million things on our to-do lists once we get home.So, why add one more responsibility to the list—especially one as important as educating our kids?That wasn’t the plan for me, but when my husband and I viewed the education landscape in 2021—when schools in Prince George’s County, Maryland, were in remote-only mode and the state pushes a radical gender curriculum that starts in pre-K—we saw homeschooling as the best option.That meant a team effort where we both would be teaching ary. Luckily, my husband does shift work as a firefighter and could be the primary teacher. But he needed help, so I filled in by working remotely to give him a breather and help teach our daughter.It’s a side hustle I have come to love, more so than any other I’ve done in the past—and I had the good fortune of writing a contributing column in the Capital Gazette newspaper for a time.When we started kindergarten at home, it wasn’t all show-and-tell and playtime. Rosemary could write some letters well, but she struggled with others. Some of her numbers would be backward. Some days, she would be easily discouraged and want to give up before we even got started.But my husband and I would coax her back and work on building up her foundation in a particular subject.Over time, we saw the results get better. She was able to trace words and then write them independently with more clarity. She is memorizing more of her addition and subtraction problems.A few weeks ago, my husband taught Rosemary how to ride her bike without training wheels.Each accomplishment has bolstered her self-esteem with authentic confidence and empowerment. She understands more what her place is in our family and society, and my husband and I have an upfront view of those wins and challenges.Being responsible for Rosemary’s education compelled me to try new roles that I might not have otherwise considered. We participated in a weekly homeschooling co-op this school year, where my husband and I shared teaching responsibilities for a few subjects.We also joined American Heritage Girls, an alternative to the Girl Scouts, and helped as troop leaders. These opportunities have been great for Rosemary, but they’ve also pushed me outside my comfort zone.Each co-op lesson or troop activity was sometimes foreign and nerve-wracking. But seeing kids glean some new information or smile after doing a group craft made the buildup and effort worthwhile.More Input, Control Over Her EducationFiguring out the education you want for your child can be overwhelming at first, but once you get your bearings, it’s amazing how much freedom you have to determine what your child learns.We followed the Code of Maryland Regulations for homeschooling to make sure Rosemary received regular and frequent lessons on English, math, science, art, music, health, physical education, and social studies. We added religion to fulfill requirements to be in a homeschooling umbrella group.But we had a lot of freedom to try several options. We used several workbooks, followed a full-scale curriculum in Saxon Math, watched educational videos, made homemade worksheets, and took impromptu nature walks and field trips.This allowed my husband and me to figure out what methods were most effective, and it gave Rosemary some variety in her learning.And we’ve allowed Rosemary to provide some input in her curriculum. After we had several science lessons on the solar system, Rosemary declared we should be done with outer space and focus instead on animals. I was happy to comply.Most importantly, we aren’t exposing Rosemary to books and concepts that would undermine her education and her view of others around her.I read several “woke” children’s books for The Heritage Foundation a few months ago. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Suffice it to say, those books are not part of our revolving library at home. Instead, we get to focus on the topics and goals to help Rosemary to grow up to be a critical thinker—not to be indoctrinated by toxic ideologies like critical race theory.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/25/im-a-full-time-working-mom-heres-why-i-love-homeschooling-my-daughter/*****************************************Jeff Jacoby: Canceling student debt will make things worseFOR WELL over a year, President Biden has been under pressure from leading Democrats to issue an executive order cancelling $50,000 of debt for every American with an outstanding student loan. For most of that time he has stuck to the position he took as a candidate: He was open to $10,000 per borrower in debt relief but $50,000 was too much, and he wanted the legal authority for such a policy to come from Congress. In the meantime, Biden continued to extend the federal freeze on student loan repayments first put in place during the Trump administration. The latest extension, announced this month, lasts until Aug. 31.But on Monday came hints that Biden has set aside his skepticism about the legality and wisdom of absolving tens of millions of borrowers' debts. CBS News reported that the president told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that he is considering various options to forgive a substantial swath of student loans. "I'm looking to do something on that, and I think you're going to like what I do," he said, according one lawmaker who attended the meeting. Later that day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that Biden "would make a decision about any cancellation of student debt" before the end of August.The decision he should make is that he was right the first time.For an unpopular Democratic president heading into a difficult midterm election, unilaterally canceling college debt may be good politics. It manifestly is not good policy. It represents moral hazard taken to an extreme, a recklessly expensive giveaway to a politically influential bloc of voters that will encourage more bad decisions in the future and exacerbate problems already at the crisis stage.How would canceling student debt make life in America worse? Let us count the ways.1. It would be inflationary.Large-scale student debt forgiveness will worsen inflation. That would be a problem at any time, but with the inflation rate now at a 40-year high and the economy teetering on the brink of recession, it should be unthinkable.Prices soar when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. As the federal government massively boosted the money supply over the past two years, the purchasing power of the dollar dwindled. Freeing borrowers from their obligation to repay loans would amount to another gusher of funds. As it is, the current freeze on loan repayment — no one has had to pay a nickel toward their student debt since March 2020 — has been fueling the inflationary fires by about $5 billion each month. That's a trivial effect compared with the impact of erasing borrowers' liability altogether. As Adam Looney of the Brookings Institution has noted, "Forgiving all student debt would be a transfer larger than the amounts the nation has spent over the past 20 years on unemployment insurance, larger than the amount it has spent on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and larger than the amount it has spent on food stamps." The result would be even more upward pressure on inflation.2. It would worsen inequity.Student debt is disproportionately an upper-middle-class phenomenon, and wiping college loans off the books would enrich the relatively well-off at the expense of the less fortunate. Only a minority of Americans have earned a college degree, and only a minority of them have gone on to graduate school. That minority-within-a-minority — which includes doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists — owes half of all outstanding student debt. It is logical for graduate students to take out more loans, since their advanced degrees generally lead to much higher earnings over the course of their careers. Liquidating that debt leaves them even more affluent and compels the majority of Americans who never got to go to college to help pay the tab for many of those who did.And as if canceling student loans isn't regressive enough, it is made even more unfair by the fact that the borrowers are more likely to have jobs. The unemployment rate among college graduates is 2 percent. For Americans with only a high school education, unemployment now stands at more than 5 percent. Why should the debts of the well-educated and well-employed be treated more indulgently than the financial burdens of those whose path in life hasn't been so favored?3. It would deepen cynicism.Unearned debt forgiveness disseminates a corrosive message. It signals to Americans that they should regard their liabilities as someone else's problem. It promotes the mindset that defaulting on debts is not shameful but understandable — and that government exists to bail out defaulters. It mocks those who behaved responsibly — the ones who saved more and worked second jobs to pay for college or who deferred higher education until they could afford it. And it's a slap in the face to college graduates who faithfully repaid their loans."I have over $17,000 in student-loan debt, and I didn't go to graduate school because I knew that getting another degree would drown me in debt that I would never be able to surpass," lamented Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a December speech. "This is unacceptable."But her decision was the right one: If you can't afford another degree — or a bigger house, or another car — you shouldn't get one. What's "unacceptable" is the lesson Ocasio-Cortez has apparently internalized: that she shouldn't be expected to pay back the loan that got her through college and put her on the path to success (and a $174,000 congressional salary). No good can come from the entrenchment of such cynical thinking.4. It would drive up the cost of college.The more the government does to make higher education affordable, the more unaffordable it becomes. Since 1980, the cost of going to college has increased 1,200 percent — more than five times the overall inflation of 236 percent. Much of that is the unintended consequence of steadily rising federal student aid. As a tidal wave of public dollars has been channeled into grants and guaranteed loans, colleges have happily raised their prices to soak those dollars up. Federal aid gives schools every incentive to keep tuition costly. Why would they reduce their sticker price to a level that more families could afford, when doing so would mean kissing millions of government dollars goodbye?For Washington to now cancel hundreds of billions in unpaid student debt — while continuing to issue and guarantee even more college loans — would be to double down on this predatory cycle. Far from reforming the out-of-control loan program that has had such a catastrophic effect on college costs and student borrowing, it would turbocharge it.If Biden is indeed gearing up to deliver radical student-debt relief, he is making a mistake. It may win votes for his party. But it will hurt more Americans than it helps and leave long-term economic and social harm in its wake.https://jeffjacoby.com/26186/canceling-student-debt-will-make-things-worse***********************************Australia: Jewish leaders condemn antisemitic Melbourne student unionA group of prominent Jewish leaders have condemned a motion passed by the University of Melbourne’s student union after it pledged support for the anti-Israeli Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, sparking fears it could have a flow-on effect across university campuses.The student union passed a wide-ranging motion on Friday condemning Zionism as a “racist colonial ideology” and pledging its support for the BDS movement, urging the university leadership to endorse an academic boycott that would cut ties with Israeli institutions, researchers, and academics that support the “Israeli oppression of Palestinians”.The Australian understands the union is the first student representative body to pass a motion formally supporting the BDS movement in the country.The motion, which was passed 10-8 by the student council on Friday, stated the union’s endorsement of the BDS movement had been “long overdue” and would encourage other student bodies to adopt similar resolutions in solidarity with Palestinians.“Students in Palestine and around the world have been key participants in the fight against the illegal occupation of Palestine, protesting, organising, and creating a discussion on respective campuses … it’s long overdue for a clear and firm stance by UMSU on these crimes,” the motion read.Jewish leaders blasted the union for creating a “fictitious” and “one-sided narrative” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, describing the resolution as “perverse” and “blatantly anti-Semitic”.Jewish Affairs Council director Colin Rubinstein said on Sunday that the language of the motion was something that could have been expected from “Hamas or Hezbollah … not from the student union of an esteemed centre of learning here in Australia”.Executive Council of Australian Jewry chief executive Peter Wertheim said it was possible other university student councils “would follow suit” and adopt a similar “anti-Semitic” motion, but added that it would be a mistake to conclude there was a “broad student consensus behind these views”.Adelaide University’s student representative council is considering a similar motion to UMSU, while the University of Western Australia’s student guild last year altered its support of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, suspending its clause condemning calls for the destruction of the state of Israel.In February, Sydney University’s student body passed a motion supporting the boycott of the Sydney Festival but has not passed a formal motion supporting the BDS movement.Mr Wertheim said the ability of a handful of student activists to pass through “propagandistic and racist resolutions” highlighted the urgent need for universities to adopt and apply the remembrance alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism.The Australian sought comment from the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide student unions, who were unavailable to reply.The Anti-Defamation Commission says acts of anti-Semitism in Australia have reached “pitch fever” following reports vandals had defaced the Lilydale Eagles Soccer Club in Melbourne, drawing Nazi swastikas on the club’s oval.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/jewish-leaders-condemn-student-union-support-for-palestinians-as-antisemitic/news-story/399464ffbcfd5ceec8757116abda2930****************************************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************2 May, 2022Many of the new working class are college-educated -- and they don't like their situation<i>In the days when America used to make things, people used to think of the working class as workers on a factory assembly line. Many jobs in new industries such as Amazon and Starbucks are however just as routine, with the wrinkle that such jobs are usually more poorly paid than the old factory jobs. So worker dissatisfaction in such new workplaces has become widespread and that has generated the same old pressures towards unionization.The NYT of course implies below that unionization will be helpful, even though unionization is more likely to lead to more automation and unemployment, as companies hit back. The reality is that such jobs will still exist and still be poorly paid regardless.So is there a better solution to the problem available? Probably not. Such jobs will always be unattractive and poorly paid for many of those who work in them. They always have been and always will.Only a big societal change in likely to change the situation. Only a reversal of credentialism is likely to help. The unending pressure on people to get higher and higher educational credentials is a large part of the problem. Only a change in those pressures is likely to change things in the workplace.Much of the dissatsifaction driving the move to unionization originates in people being made the false promise that more education will lead to better jobs. For many it will not. For them it would have been better NOT to undertake ever higher levels of education. They are right to be angered by the false promises that have been made to them. Disillusionment with college education seems now to be catching on. One can only hope that it continues</i>Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them.Over the past decade and a half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.More here:https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/business/college-workers-starbucks-amazon-unions.html***********************************************Amazon Targets Conservative Children’s Book About Gender IdentityOnce again, Amazon has shown it’s on the side of leftist activists, not free speech.Matt Walsh, a popular conservative podcast host and writer at The Daily Wire, just released a children’s book titled “Johnny the Walrus.” The book, according to the description on Amazon, tells the tale of Johnny, who likes to pretend to be a dinosaur or a knight.But one day “when the internet people find out Johnny likes to make-believe, he’s forced to make a decision between the little boy he is and the things he pretends to be—and he’s not allowed to change his mind,” states the description.Amazon is clearly trying to squash Walsh’s book.According to Walsh, his picture book has been removed from the category of children’s books and moved to political books. Ads for the book on Amazon also have been rejected by the tech giant as not being “appropriate for all audiences”—an umbrella term for standards that ban advertising for books promoting incest and pedophilia, among other things.Amazon did not response to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.Despite all this, Walsh’s book is soaring on Amazon, becoming No. 1 in books Wednesday.This isn’t the first time Amazon has targeted conservative books. Last year, Amazon blocked ads for the new book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution,” by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation, which attempted to purchase the ads.)After The Daily Signal reported on its actions against the Gonzalez book, Amazon reversed its decision and claimed the ads initially were blocked due to “inaccurately enforced” policies.Last year, Amazon also banned Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.”In response to a letter from four U.S. senators inquiring as to why Amazon had stopped selling Anderson’s book, Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, responded, “We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson, however, notes that his book doesn’t characterize LGBTQ+ identities as a mental illness.Meanwhile, while Anderson’s book is too dangerous, Amazon continues to sell Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”And just like every other Big Tech company, Amazon never seems to censor or block leftists. Nor does it treat leftist books as too political to be classified as children’s books.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/27/amazon-targets-conservative-childrens-book-about-gender-identity***************************************‘Underhanded’: School Invites Students to Observe LGBTQ Day Without Parents’ KnowledgeWhether you know it or not, your child’s school may have observed a “Day of Silence” on behalf of the LGBTQ movement.The advocacy group GLSEN invited schools across the country to hold a demonstration Friday to show support for LGBTQ students and their allies.GLSEN encouraged participants to “take a vow of silence to protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGBTQ people in schools,” according to the group’s website.The Day of Silence would end, the group said, with participants holding “Breaking the Silence” rallies and events “to share their experiences during the protest and bring attention to ways their schools and communities can become more inclusive.”One parent, whose son attends a private high school in Connecticut that has no religious affiliation, told The Daily Signal that her “suspicion” is that “a lot of schools, especially private schools, were participating in this.”The mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son received an email from school administrators inviting students to wear rainbow colors last Friday and participate in a “Day of Action” to “support our LGBTQ+ community.”The private school in Connecticut sent the email to students and faculty, but not to parents, the mother told The Daily Signal.The email to students referenced “over 220 laws” that the school said targeted LGBTQ Americans this year, and included a link to a slideshow discussing some of the laws and the significance of the Day of Silence.One slide tells students that “many states are trying to pass, or have passed, laws that prevent transgender youth from receiving gender affirming health care.” The slide adds that “gender affirming health care” includes “reversable puberty blockers and other hormone treatments” that “are shown to reduce transgender rates of suicide by 30%.”Jay Richards, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says he believes that the only thing blocking the agenda of radical gender identity activists is “wide-awake parents.”“Gender ideology is about dissolving the biological reality of male and female and replacing it with an entirely subjective notion of ‘gender identity’—which has no clear meaning or limiting principle,” Richards said in an email to The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.“This isn’t just an abstract philosophical idea,” he said. “Gender ideology threatens the minds and bodies of students.”The slides sent to students by the Connecticut school also address Florida’s new parental rights law, which opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. One slide states that critics argue that the law puts LGBTQ+ students at risk because it:Affects the books students can read in elementary school, possibly prevents students with same-sex parents from talking about their families, creates the potential for teachers to be penalized or sued for classroom discussion, thereby stifling important conversations, [and] potentially prevents discussions of gender and sexuality beyond third grade.The mother who spoke with The Daily SIgnal said she found it strange that her son’s school was putting such an emphasis on passage of a bill in Florida, because “these types of things are not being proposed in Connecticut.”Emailing students an invitation to participate in a pro-LGBTQ rally, and sending them a slideshow with a political message without parents’ knowledge “seems underhanded to me,” the mother said, “especially if they’re going to ask kids to basically participate in … political engagement.”She wonders whether administrators at her son’s school “would be equally willing to support student activism to protect girls sports for biological females,” the mother said.“In Connecticut, our female student athletes are having to compete against boys. But I haven’t heard of any local schools engaging their student bodies to defend girls sports,” she said.Parents are “waking up to a gender ideology that has been working its way into our schools and student curricula for years,” Heritage’s Richards said. “Those who thought the issue just involved accommodating a few kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes have had a rude awakening.”https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/27/underhanded-school-invites-students-to-observe-lgbtq-day-without-parents-knowledge/***********************************My other blogs: Main ones belowhttp://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)*******************************1 May, 2022Why the Left Wants Twitter Over Tolstoy in Our SchoolsIf one leftist teachers group gets its way, reading literature in school will be replaced by reading internet memes and Twitter posts.A powerful group of educators called the National Council of Teachers of English recently released a statement calling on schools to “decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.”But why? To more thoroughly push its leftist ideology, of course.The statement goes on to support critical pedagogies, referring to Marxist ideas, a la critical race theory. It reads,Educators value the use of teaching and learning practices that help to identify and disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism, sexism, consumerism, and economic injustice. Critical pedagogies help learners see themselves as empowered change agents, able to imagine and build a better, more just world.The left frequently attacks traditional educational strategies like reading classical literature as upholding white supremacy.Founded in 1911, the National Council of Teachers of English boasts that it has 25,000 members across the country that receive its materials and recommendations. One English teacher in Massachusetts bragged about getting Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey” removed from her school’s curriculum, while the journalists at NPR extoll listeners to “decolonize” their bookshelves.The group goes full radical Marxist by saying kids should learn critical literacy and critical media literacy, dropping all pretense of neutrality. “Critical” here is a thinly veiled code for Marxist-style ideology.For example, one recommendation reads that students should “examine the cultural, ideological, and sociolinguistic content of the curriculum and focus on the uses of literacy for social justice in marginalized and disenfranchised communities.”Another recommendation pushes students to “examine mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies by analyzing relationships between media and audiences, information, and power, often with attention to media institutions and representations that address systemic inequalities and social justice.”The rise of social media and increasing reliance the world has on technology represents an ever-evolving frontier in education. Kids today will need to be taught differently than generations that preceded them, and a focus on parsing online information should be included in a modern curriculum.However, in their quest to eliminate any semblance of the old fact- and logic-based order, the left has decided that reading and writing must be sacrificed on the altar of memes and social media.The council declares this in its statement when it says, “We no longer live in a print-dominant, text-only world. We experience this reality daily in the GIFs and selfies we share with one another, the memes and videos we circulate through our social media feeds.”But modern education shouldn’t be media literacy instead of classical literature, it should be media literacy and classical literature.Authors from times past still offer valuable lessons and insight into the human condition, and as a society, we suffer enormously when we replace them with quick quips from Twitter.Indeed, it’s our obsession with reducing messages to sound bites and 280-character tweets that’s part of the cause of today’s moral rot. Distilling strong values and lessons about what it means to be good people and good citizens is impossible under such conditions.Literature takes effort and skill to unpack, but the value is immeasurable.It’s also important to learn actual media literacy, not just the twisted social justice-oriented media literacy being pushed by the National Council of Teachers of English. Students should be able to tell when an outlet is lying or stretching the truth and be able to parse between opinion and fact.By eliminating classical literature from our education system, the left hopes to fill the gap with dogma and propaganda. It hopes to weaponize yet another angle of scholastic life.We’ve already seen the dire consequences of the radical left’s long march through the school system. Allowing it to destroy yet another bulwark of classical education leaves America one step closer to total leftist dominance. Literature helps to repel that invasion.As “Fahrenheit 451” author Ray Bradbury said, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”With those words in mind, it’s essential for kids to keep on reading.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/26/why-the-left-wants-twitter-over-tolstoy-in-our-schools/***********************************************Clemson University backpedalsOne of the most dangerous developments in recent years at college campuses has been universities setting up Star Chamber, Soviet-style, show trial procedures over complaints of sexual assault in which the universities deny basic and fundamental due process rights to accused students. That includes refusing to allow the students an opportunity to present exculpatory evidence, to question their accusers and cross-examine witnesses, or to be represented by a lawyer.A South Carolina jury just awarded a Clemson University student, Andrew Pampu, $5.3 million for defamation and civil conspiracy by a female Clemson student, her boyfriend, and her father.The university had suspended Pampu for a year after finding him guilty of sexual misconduct against Erin Wingo. To get to that finding, however, the university ignored multiple witnesses and text messages showing that Wingo had consensual sex with Pampu and manufactured a rape claim only after her boyfriend, Colin Gahagan, found out about it.Pampu filed a lawsuit after he received a text message from Gahagan admitting that Pampu was innocent, that Gahagan had lied in the hearing, that Wingo “wanted to have sex that night,” and that Gahagan had deleted texts “from that night that prove she was f—— crazy.”Clemson acted almost immediately to remove the disciplinary finding against Pampu and agreed to pay him $100,000, likely saving Clemson from an even bigger judgment against the university. Of course, if it had not ignored the exculpatory evidence in the first place and assumed Pampu was guilty, it would not have had to pay anything.Unfortunately, the trend toward madness at the secondary education level is sure to increase if the Biden administration has its way with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.The Office for Management and Budget is reviewing a new rule on the 50-year-old statute that would expand Title IX’s prohibition on “sex” discrimination to “gender identity” discrimination, thereby upending women’s sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in schools across the country.In addition, the new Title IX rule would roll back the Trump administration’s Department of Education rule on campus sexual assault, which requires due process protections such as representation by counsel and the right to present exculpatory evidence and cross-examine witnesses, including the accuser.This new rule once again would implement a “guilty until proven innocent” assumption, leading to more cases such as what happened to Pampu at Clemson.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/21/3-colleges-get-their-just-desserts/************************************************Georgia Governor Signs Bills to Banish Wokeness From SchoolsGeorgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed seven education bills into law Thursday taking aim at wokeness in schools, including legislation that limits discussions about race in classrooms and transgender students’ ability to compete in women’s sports.The bills included Georgia’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, or HB 1178, which “provides greater transparency to parents and legal guardians regarding what their student is being taught in school and protects the fundamental right of moms and dads across this state to direct the education of their child,” according to a press release.Another bill, the Protect Students First Act, or HB 1084, prohibits “divisive concepts” such as the belief that one race is inherently superior to another race, the U.S. is fundamentally racist country, or that an individual, “by virtue of his or her race, is inherently or consciously racist or oppressive toward individuals of other races.”The law also allows the state athletic association to pass a law prohibiting “students whose gender is male from participating in athletic events that are designated for students whose gender is female.”“As the parents of three daughters, Marty and I want every young girl in this state to have every opportunity to succeed in the sport they love,” Kemp said in a statement. “That should not be controversial.”Other signed bills will require the removal of obscene materials from school libraries, ensure transparency at school board meetings, double on the current donation cap for student scholarships, create a committee that will look at ways to ensure student financial literacy, and allow retired teachers to return to the classroom full time in areas with high demand.“Unfortunately, there are those outside our state, and other members in the General Assembly, who chose partisan politics over commonsense reforms to put our students and our parents first,” Kemp said. “But standing up for the God-given potential of each and every child in our schools and protecting the teaching of freedom, liberty, opportunity, and the American dream in the classroom should not be controversial.”“Making sure parents have the ultimate say in their child’s education should not be controversial,” he added.https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/this-should-not-be-controversial-georgia-governor-signs-bills-to-banish-wokeness-from-schools/***********************************