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December 30, 2022
Fury as University of Warwick issues 'racism' trigger warning for Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe over 'offensive' depictions of black slaves and Arab Muslim captives
I think I read all of his novels whren I was a kid. Good stories
A descendant of legendary novelist Sir Walter Scott has slammed a university's decision to slap trigger warnings on his historic works and branded them 'cowardly'.
The celebrated Scottish writer, who penned his epic Ivanhoe in 1819, has seen his work branded 'disturbing' by academics at the University of Warwick.
Critics have said Scott's historical novel could be 'offensive' to modern audiences because of its treatment of racial minorities, which includes black slaves and Muslim captives, who along with other characters in the work are prejudiced against Jews.
But the author's great-great-great-great-grandson, Matthew Maxwell-Scott, defended his ancestor's work and was left saddened that Ivanhoe was branded potentially upsetting.
He told the Telegraph: 'Attacking those who cannot defend themselves has always been a coward's charter.
'Today, social media and the growth of academia provide new playgrounds for the modern bully. Long-deceased artists are a particular target. Often exhibiting the hated traits of maleness, paleness and, to some eyes at least, staleness, it is open season.'
The events of Ivanhoe, published in 1819, follow England after the Third Crusade with the protagonist Sir Wilfred Ivanhoe and the raging conflict between Anglo-Saxon and Norman nobles.
The university's English department warns students who are to study the novel: 'Amongst the aspects readers might find disturbing, this text includes offensive depictions of people of colour and of persecuted ethnic minorities, as well as misogyny.'
In common with dozens of universities, Warwick uses such warnings to alert students to sensitive material, such as racism, homophobia and violence, so they can prepare themselves for a potentially unpleasant experience.
Mr Maxwell-Scott, a trustee of his ancestor's residence at Abbotsford and a Conservative councillor, said the university's trigger warning was 'disappointing'.
He added: 'All manner of titles can face this as we seem to have lost the ability to appreciate any artistic output as a product of its time.
'Scott, the father of the historical novel, used his meticulous research to transport readers of Ivanhoe to a different moral landscape, one alien to the Enlightenment world he was forged in, let alone that of today.
'Seeking out theoretical faults rather than identifying the many positives is a shame. Consider Scott's contribution to our language. He is the third most-quoted source in the Oxford English Dictionary.'
Warwick, one of 24 members of the elite Russell Group of British universities, began using trigger warnings in 2019, but had received several complaints in recent years about the content of its literature and drama courses.
A spokesman from the University of Warwick said: 'We believe students should be exposed to challenging ideas, stories and themes through their studies and view it as an essential part of learning and understanding different perspectives. That's why the university does not ask departments to issue content guidance notices for course materials.
'However, a small number of departments and academics choose to do so, making their own judgment and rationale for deciding on what guidance they feel may be needed for the coursework they set.
'We fully respect our colleagues right to exercise their academic freedom in this way, but the practice remains rare within the university with less than one per cent of our overall curriculum including any content guidance.'
Born on August 15 1771, Sir Walter Scott was became fascinated by the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders.
He overcame a bout of polio in his childhood and launched his literary career at 25, beginning to write professionally and translating many works from German.
Dubbed 'The Wizard of the North', Scott was praised by his descendants as an 'early advocate for mindfulness, an environmentalist and a devoted family man'.
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A battle over charter co-location reveals how deeply progressives are wrong
The war against excellence reared its ugly head again at a city Panel for Educational Policy meeting Wednesday night — this time as a verbal brawl between charter-school supporters, who sought approval for a co-location in a Sheepshead Bay school, and those who opposed it. Success Academy won its permission, but the battle revealed how deep the anti-academic fervor is inside New York City public schools.
Students both for and against the co-location spoke, and the supplied talking points were quite obvious as many repeated the same ideas using the same words, but some ventured to share their own opinions. What emerged from most of the opponents was a clear distaste for having Success — or any school that’s unapologetically academic and focused on student achievement — in the midst of their school buildings, as if something unsavory would rub off. Why? Why does a school that relentlessly promotes and celebrates student academic success provoke such anger in those who should be doing the exact same thing?
The city’s traditional public schools — the base camp of the teachers unions — have over the last many years focused their efforts on something called SEL: social-emotional learning. There are no tests for SEL, nothing that can let you know if a student has mastered the subject or if a teacher is doing a great job, a mediocre job or nothing at all.
SEL is all about feelings and behaviors. Words like “microaggressions,” “oppression” and “gender identity” come up a lot during SEL workshops and teacher trainings. Grades, tests and achievements, not so much.
De-emphasizing academics and student achievement is, unfortunately, not just a New York City trend — it is a national phenomenon. Asra Nomani, a reporter and education activist who has fought the anti-merit attacks on her child’s once famously rigorous Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, described this week how the school sought to downplay and ignore its National Merit Scholars by not properly notifying students or families in a timely and public manner.
Will Hochul let union pawns keep strangling charter schools?
A school administrator explained, “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” adding that the school didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of non-scholar students.
What if you’re a really smart kid who takes pride in your academic achievements? What if the answer to “Who am I as an individual?” is “the best mathematician in my class,” “aspiring scientist” or “National Merit Scholar”? How can that be hard for schoolteachers and administrators to understand?
The supporters of Success Academy’s co-location application included students, parents and even alumni who each took hours out of their Wednesday night to listen to an hours-long Zoom meeting and offer up two minutes of testimony about how Success positively shaped their lives. They were pleading for the opportunity to site a K-4 school in an inconveniently located building that already contains two high schools, one a transfer high school. They were begging for crumbs.
The South Brooklyn Success Academy locations have growing waitlists because city public-school families want what Success is known for — rigorous academics and a focus on student achievement. Success Academy students outperform their city district-school peers, with proficiency rates for black and Hispanic students up to triple those for district peers.
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Student Parents Need Online Learning Options to Succeed
As colleges and universities work to bounce back from a pandemic that drastically changed the way most people view higher education, many students are hoping some changes stick around – especially many college students who are also parents. Millions of students over the last few years experienced a complete shift to virtual learning, forcing higher education institutions to become more flexible to meet student needs. But with COVID concerns waning, many colleges have rushed to bring students back on campus, rolling back the virtual infrastructure that made it easier for so many students, particularly non-traditional students, to succeed.
Frankly, many students do not want to return exclusively to the classroom. A recent report found preferences for course modalities rapidly shifted over the course of the pandemic with mostly face-to-face classes dropping from 30% of respondents to 12% while completely online courses jumped from 5% to 20%, suggesting students are starting to prefer the flexible benefits of virtual education options over in-person.
This sentiment is certainly shared by student parents who are often overlooked when it comes to student needs, yet they represent more than one in five (22%) of the overall undergraduate population. While many share similar struggles with other students, they also have to contend with the high cost of childcare and the difficulty of staying enrolled in a system that was not built with their needs or experiences in mind.
Over the last two years, we have seen that while virtual learning is not perfect, it does allow student parents to stay home with their children while taking classes online. When coupled with the ability to complete various exams and assignments at times that are convenient for them, this learning environment can be extremely beneficial for student parents who have more demands on their time than their non-parenting peers.
The annual cost of childcare can average close to $10,000 a year for one child. These costs can be difficult for dual parents with stable incomes, let alone a single parent trying to juggle the costs of school tuition and childcare.
While universities alone can’t be expected to cover all the costs of childcare, many have cut their own childcare programs over the years, leading to a 14 percent decline in on-campus childcare from 2004 to 2019. The trend is even worse among community colleges where most student parents are enrolled and are experiencing a steeper reduction of 17 percent. The federal government has made efforts to help reverse this trend by more than tripling its childcare grant funding to schools in 2018 from $15 to $50 million to serve low-income students with children. Despite this increase, estimates show the program only reaches about 11,000 of the 4.8 million total student parents.
The gap between childcare needs and availability is unlikely to be fixed in the near future given the scale of the issue across all industries, but it makes clear the need to provide parents with more opportunities, like virtual learning, to help them balance their busy lives.
Lack of affordable, reliable childcare is one of many obstacles that student parents face and that disproportionately impacts their academic careers. It’s less often the academic rigor of college that makes it difficult to stay enrolled and more often the lack of financial resources and having to navigate policies that further exclude them. For example, students with children are often forced to take semesters off or to transfer schools because they can’t afford to stay in school or their childcare is interrupted. As a result, policies that limit transfer credits or federal Pell Grants that expire after six years can force student parents to retake classes with even less financial support. One way to help parents catch up is through online education resources that include study guides, practice questions, writing assistance, and detailed descriptions of how to solve complex math problems. For these students who often cannot make it to office hours, online resources provide a vital lifeline to help students learn at a pace and time that works with their busy schedules.
According to a recent report by Chegg, an online educational resource company, 55% of student parents have considered dropping out of school due to the demands of parenting while 73% of student parents who have children in middle school or below have missed work or class because of childcare arrangements. Colleges must identify ways to be more inclusive of parenting students in campus life and an institution-wide lens that considers the needs of student parents in the implementation of all of its services.
Studies show that student parents are 10 times less likely to achieve a college degree in five years compared to those without kids. Colleges and lawmakers must work to ensure students are not unfairly locked out of the higher education system because they are raising children. Embracing the virtual and hybrid learning opportunities we have developed over the course of the pandemic, along with supportive online resources that can help student parents study on their own schedule wherever they might be, will help ensure all students have a fair shot at earning a degree.
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December 29, 2022
Detroit School Board Removes Ben Carson’s Name from School for His ‘Crime’ of Serving Under Trump
David Sokol
The Detroit school board recently voted to remove world-renowned neurosurgeon and native son Dr. Ben Carson’s name from its Benjamin Carson High School of Science and Medicine magnet school. The reason: Carson served in the Cabinet of President Donald Trump.
Before it was scrubbed, the school’s website glowingly stated why it was named after Carson:
The school is named in honor of the acclaimed Detroit-born, African-American pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson. As a pediatric neurosurgeon formerly on the staff of Johns Hopkins Hospital, Dr. Carson was honored with the 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions.
The school aims to honor the contributions Dr. Carson has made not only to the global medical community, but also as a role model for Detroit students with aspirations and interests in science and medical fields.
The website also pointed out that “over 99% of our students graduate” and that the school “is a safe school with a strong college-going culture.”
While COVID-19 lowered the 2019-2021 average graduation rate at the school to 89.5%, it still significantly outperformed the Detroit public schools average graduation rate of 64.5%.
So, what has caused such an underperforming school district to remove the name Benjamin Carson from its best-performing high school? Wokeness and cancel culture, plain and simple.
Was Carson accused of committing a crime? Did he make some outrageous statements? Of course not. His sole offense, as stated by former and current Detroit school board members Lamar Lemmons and Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, is that he had the audacity to agree to be the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump.
Think about that. Volunteering to serve your country in the important role of a Cabinet secretary negates all of your prior accomplishments, disqualifies your name from being on a school building, and erases you as a role model to disadvantaged youth.
This insane decision explains why the Detroit school district ranks among the worst-performing districts in America. Detroit school board members would rather play politics and be woke than focus on the urgent need to teach the district’s young men and women reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The Detroit Free Press in a May 18, 2021, article pointed out that “Detroit Public Schools’ students recently won the award of the worst math scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ 40-year history.”
Parents who actually care about their children’s education must retake the school board, or else students will continue to receive an inferior education.
Any school district in America should welcome the opportunity to have such an amazing American as Carson serve as a role model for their students. He and his brother were raised by a single mother who was a domestic worker in the poorest part of Detroit. She emphasized to her boys the importance of a good education, hard work, and determination.
From the humblest of beginnings, Carson became a world-renowned neurosurgeon, and his brother became an accomplished physicist. His mother kept them focused on achieving their American Dream and rejecting the victimhood being spewed by charlatan black politicians.
Dr. Ben Carson is among the kindest, gentlest, and most well-intentioned people whom I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. This slight by the Detroit school board demonstrates just how harmful cancel culture and wokeness truly can be—harmful not only to the target of that cancel culture but to all the children who would benefit if the school board focused its energy on providing a quality education rather than on being woke.
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Independent Institute Research Vindicates DeSantis Ed Reform
A recent National Review article, on education reforms implemented by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, praised original research by the Independent Institute. Independent’s report titled “Better than Common Core: Florida’s New K-12 Standards Raise the Bar” demonstrated that the state’s new English language arts and math standards are now the strongest in the country and suggested they could serve as a model for the rest of the nation.
In 2020, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis implemented significant curricular reform, replacing the controversial Common Core standards with new, high-rigor reading and math standards. Florida’s new “Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (B.E.S.T.)” standards shed the mechanistic skills-oriented approach favored by Common Core and restored, for example, classic literature to the English curriculum. These reforms made Florida likely the only state to have rid itself of Common Core after fully adopting it.
As National Review stated:
You can read about DeSantis’s replacement of the failed Common Core in a 2020 report from the Independent Institute called “Better than Common Core: Florida’s New K-12 Standards Raise the Bar.” The report says that Florida’s English language arts and math standards truly do depart from Common Core. More, it calls them “the strongest [reading and math standards] currently in use in the United States.” The report adds that with some slight tweaks, the Florida standards “can stand as a new model for the country.”
https://blog.independent.org/2022/12/28/impactful-education-research/
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Parents’ Rights Activists Turn to Courts To Block ‘Radical’ Ideologies in Classrooms
Across the country, parents are springing into action to defend what they insist are their rights to oversee the education of their children.
These so-called parental rights activists, animated by prolonged school closures during the Covid pandemic, are challenging the supremacy of the educational bureaucracy in their children’s schools. These parents are calling attention to left-leaning curricular material and literature in classrooms, and are protesting the “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” they say are being taught in schools.
It’s a movement that catapulted Glenn Youngkin to the governorship of Virginia and helped lift Governor DeSantis of Florida to his prominent spot on the national stage. It has galvanized parents to show up in hordes at what were once poorly attended school board meetings, and even propelled some to run for school boards themselves.
Now, parents are turning to lawsuits in an attempt to curb policies they see as discriminatory, harmful, invasive, and even in violation of their constitutional rights. These lawsuits, however, could put conservative parents on a collision course with conservative jurists, including Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.
As the battle for parents’ rights moves to the federal courthouse from the ballot box, it raises a question: Does our Constitution enshrine parents’ rights?
A lawsuit filed in Iowa by one of the most prominent parents rights groups, Parents Defending Education, alleges that a new policy enacted by the Linn-Mar school district, in a suburb of Cedar Rapids, violates the Constitution. The policy allows students to use new pronouns at school and begin social transition — using the bathrooms, playing on sports teams, and rooming on school trips with the gender of their preference — without parental consent or information.
“Everybody from kindergarten on would be able to have a gender support plan,” the president and founder of Parents Defending Education, Nicole Neily, tells the Sun. “Then beginning in seventh grade, the child’s decision takes precedence over parents’ decisions.”
In a recent study by transgender advocates at Princeton, the majority of children — about 60 percent — who socially transitioned between ages three and 12 began a hormone altering regimen within five years.
The lawsuit alleges that the new policy “plainly violates parents’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
“Nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent makes two things clear: parents have a constitutional liberty interest in the care, custody, and control of their children,” the initial complaint says, adding that the policy also violates the students’ First Amendment rights by way of “compelled speech.”
The 14th Amendment, though, makes no mention of parents or children in its text. Yet the court filings claim that the new policy violates the parents’ constitutional right “to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control,” citing not the text of the Constitution itself, but a 1925 Supreme Court case, Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
The existence of such a right hinges on whether one accepts the legal principle of substantive due process, which has long been the subject of ire from conservative jurists.
Pierce, along with Meyer v. Nebraska, established a 14th Amendment principle that education law not infringe upon the rights of parents to choose their child’s education. Pierce overturned an Oregon law requiring all students to attend public schools, while Meyer overturned a Nebraska ordinance prohibiting foreign language instruction.
In Pierce, the court ruled that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
The 14th Amendment’s guarantee that no “State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” includes — or so say advocates of substantive due process — both the right to procedural due process (a fair trial, in other words) and substantive rights to “life, liberty, or property.”
“The view is that the 14th Amendment, which has a provision that says that no one can be deprived of liberty without due process of law … has a procedural component,” a professor of law at Villanova University, Michael Moreland, told the Sun. “There are basic norms of fair procedure, like how a trial was conducted, and so forth.”
“But it also includes a substantive component of certain liberties that are so fundamental that the government may not infringe upon them,” Mr. Moreland explained. “There’s basically no due process of law that could ever result in their abolition or infringement in a certain way.”
It is the principle of substantive due process that in the past century has been used as a foundation for rights such as abortion, contraception, and gay and interracial marriage. The Supreme Court has noted that rulings based on substantive due process can be a “treacherous field,” and a high standard must be set for the fundamental liberties derived from the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court holds that any rights derived from the 14th Amendment must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “essential to our Nation’s scheme of ordered liberty.”
In the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade’s claim to a substantive due process right to abortion, the court ruled that the right to an abortion was not so “deeply rooted” as to merit constitutional protection. The overturning of Roe has led many to question whether all substantive due process precedents may be in danger.
The rights of parents in their child’s education, however, would likely hold up under the historical scrutiny applied in the Dobbs decision, Mr. Moreland of Villanova says — even though he notes that today’s parental rights movement is asking for more than precedent might guarantee.
“Pierce and Meyer were about prohibiting private schooling, prohibiting foreign language instruction, things like that. I think courts are going to be a little cautious about trying to manage school district curricula through litigation,” Mr. Moreland says. “I think the question now is, what are the real limits of that kind of state regulation, and when and to what extent does it infringe on parental liberty?”
These questions are relevant unless one rejects substantive due process altogether, as Justice Thomas has suggested he’s prepared to do. In past opinions, the justice has had harsh words for a principle that he sees as a “legal fiction.”
Justice Thomas — alone among the Nine in his complete rejection of the principle — has referred to substantive due process as an “oxymoron that lacks any basis in the Constitution” based on a “demonstrably incorrect reading of the Due Process Clause.”
Even if Justice Thomas demurs on substantive due process, he — and jurists like him — could flip the question on its head: do children have constitutional rights outside the purview of their parents?
In a lone dissent in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which ruled children have First Amendment rights to purchase violent video games without parental consent, Justice Thomas made an originalist argument that the First Amendment “does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors’ parents or guardians.”
“The history clearly shows a founding generation that believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children,” Justice Thomas wrote in 2011.
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December 28, 2022
Adnan Syed of ‘Serial,’ Newly Freed, Is Hired by Georgetown University
Adnan Syed, who was freed in September after he spent 23 years in prison fighting a murder conviction that was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” has been hired by Georgetown University as an associate for an organization whose work mirrors the efforts that led to his release, the university has announced.
Syed, the subject of the 2014 podcast and pop-culture sensation that raised questions about whether he had received a fair trial after being convicted of strangling his high school classmate and onetime girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, will work for Georgetown’s Prisons and Justice Initiative.
Syed, who was 17 at the time of Lee’s death in Baltimore, has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
The university said Syed, now 41, will help support programs at the organization, such as a class in which students reinvestigate wrongful convictions and seek to “bring innocent people home” by creating short documentaries about their findings. The program, founded in 2016, “brings together leading scholars, practitioners, students and those affected by the criminal justice system to tackle the problem of mass incarceration,” according to its website.
Georgetown University, which is in Washington, said that in the year leading up to his release, Syed was enrolled in the university’s bachelor of liberal arts program at the Maryland prison where he was incarcerated.
“To go from prison to being a Georgetown student and then to actually be on campus on a pathway to work for Georgetown at the Prisons and Justice Initiative, it’s a full circle moment,” Syed said in a statement. “PJI changed my life. It changed my family’s life. Hopefully I can have the same kind of impact on others.”
He added that he hoped to continue his education at Georgetown and go to law school.
In October, prosecutors in Baltimore dropped the charges against Syed after DNA testing on items that had never been fully examined proved Syed’s innocence, officials said.
Lee’s family filed an appeal with the Maryland Court of Special Appeals after prosecutors dropped the charges.
On Nov. 4, the court said in an order that the appeal could be heard in court in February.
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DeSantis Delivers Another Blow to Teachers Unions
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is taking on the teachers unions by asking the legislature to eliminate automatic union dues reductions from educator paychecks.
"Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida promised Monday to sign a bill into law that would increase teacher pay by a record amount — but he also wants to clamp down on teachers' unions. The plan DeSantis outlined at a school board retreat in Orlando would have teachers send a check to their unions every month rather than automatically deduct the dues from their paychecks,"
Business Insider reports. "DeSantis' plan would create a new hurdle for organized labor in Florida, whose "Right to Work" status is already enshrined in the state constitution. Under current law, Florida workers can opt out of joining a union, which in turn restricts unions from collecting dues from employees who benefit from negotiated worker protections."
In addition, DeSantis is touting Florida as a state respectful of parental rights in education.
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Australia: Low-fee private schools rival expensive counterparts in final exams
At Alpha Omega College, a co-ed school in a suburban office block, students don’t wear uniforms, teachers are called by their first names and there is no bell to round up pupils to class.
“It’s not a normal school,” says deputy principal Wesam Krayem. “We do things differently and it makes students feel like there are fewer barriers. We also open the school on weekends and holidays for extra tutoring sessions.”
The western Sydney college is one of multiple lower-fee private schools across NSW that had similar — or better — HSC success rates than schools where fees tip over $20,000 a year, a Herald analysis has found.
Catholic schools that charge fees of about $6000 a year or less — including Randwick’s Brigidine College, Hurstville’s Bethany College and Parramatta Marist High — had a similar or a higher portion of students achieving band-six HSC results as St Joseph’s in Hunters Hill and the Scots College in Bellevue Hill, where parents pay about $40,000 for year 12.
St Clare’s College in Waverley — which charges about $7000 for year 12 — was the highest-ranked systemic Catholic school at 31st out of the 143 top private schools analysed, based on the past two years of HSC results. It had a success rate similar to Barker College and St Ignatius College Riverview, where final-year fees are more than $32,000.
Former chair of NSW Education Standards Authority Tom Alegounarias said fees did not necessarily correlate with consistently high academic performance.
“Results likely reflect all sorts of dynamics beyond the socio-economic backgrounds of students. It could be about the relative effectiveness of the school, and if there is healthy competition among staff and students. Schools might be focusing on academic achievement and the rigours that are needed to get those results. Band sixes are also only one indicator, and are not a reliable indicator of range achievement in schools,” Alegounarias said.
At Auburn’s Alpha Omega College there is an intense focus on academic results and a strict no mobile phone policy for the 500-odd students at the school.
“There is a ‘never give up attitude’ ... students get constant feedback on how they are going. The school is open on some weekends for study groups and algebra workshops,” said Krayem. Parents pay about $13,000 for year 12 at the school.
The Herald’s analysis compared fees with HSC success rates — the ratio of band six results at a school compared to the number of students that sat exams. It used this year’s fees published on school websites, and if these weren’t available took the most recent fees and charges reported or used data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to estimate fees.
Authorities only release the names and schools of students who achieve in the top band of their subject. Private school sectors have previously suggested the NSW government release more data to reflect the efforts of all students, not just the top achievers.
Fees at Al Noori Muslim School in Greenacre and Al Faisal College are roughly $3000 a year, and those schools had a similar portion of students in the top HSC bands as Knox Grammar and Kincoppal Rose Bay.
Chief executive of Catholic Schools NSW Dallas McInerney said the sector aimed to provide choice for parents through a system of low-fee comprehensive schools.
“HSC results do not account for socio-economic background, fees or enrolment policy, therefore the results of these schools and students are really an against-the-odds story,” he said.
‘We set the bar high’: How Reddam House blitzed HSC maths
Robyn Rodwell, the principal of Catholic systemic school Bethany College, said the school had high expectations of the girls.
“Before we teach a new topic we do pre-testing to find out what they already know, and that way after we’ve taught the unit you can see how much they’ve grown. We also invest in really solid teacher development programs,” she said.
Head of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW Geoff Newcombe said the median fee collected for private schools in NSW was around $5200 a year. “These schools are not selective, and their regular success reflects the commitment of the students, their families, teachers and principals to strong academic outcomes at all levels.”
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December 23, 2022
Woke University Walks Back Proposal to Censor 'Harmful Language' - It Only Took 48 Hours After People Noticed
An elite university is seemingly walking back a rigid campus language code two days after it was rolled out to widespread criticism.
Stanford University appeared to have removed mention of its “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” from its website as of Monday, according to The Washington Free Beacon. The initiative was a product of the university’s IT department.
The webpage for the initiative went live over the weekend, the Free Beacon reported. The proposed language policies were the subject of a critical Op-Ed published by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.
The university resource outlined a laundry list of “harmful” words and phrases that would be removed from Stanford websites and suggested politically correct alternatives to the objectionable language.
Words like “freshman” and “mankind” were singled out for being “gender-based.” Terms such as “blind study” and “tone-deaf” were criticized as “ableist.”
Even the word “American” was designated as “harmful” on the grounds that it supposedly ascribes supremacy to the U.S. over other countries in the Americas.
A professor at Stanford’s medical school publicly rejected the proposed elimination of the word “American.”
“I remember how proud I was when I became a naturalized American citizen,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tweeted. “I’m still proud to be an American, and I don’t care that [Stanford] disapproves of my using the term.”
Steve Gallagher, Stanford’s chief information officer, released a statement on Tuesday distancing the school from the censorious initiative.
“Over the last couple of days, there has been much discussion of a website that provides advice for the IT community at Stanford about word choices in Stanford websites and code,” Gallagher said.
“First and importantly, the website does not represent university policy. It also does not represent mandates or requirements,” he clarified.
Gallagher said the word “American” would not be banned by the university.
“We have particularly heard concerns about the guide’s treatment of the term ‘American,'” Gallagher said. “We understand and appreciate those concerns. To be very clear, not only is the use of the term ‘American’ not banned at Stanford, it is absolutely welcomed.”
Gallagher indicated that the speech code was undergoing “continual review,” suggesting that it could return in an altered capacity.
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Elementary School Counselor Gets 25 Years in Prison for Exploiting Underage Girls Through Snapchat
A former elementary school counselor in West Virginia will go to prison for 25 years for reportedly exploiting underage girls on the photo-sharing app Snapchat.
Todd Roatsey, 43, who was a counselor at Pinch Elementary School in Pinch, West Virginia, used Snapchat to connect with minors while posing as an 18-year-old boy, according to the New York Post:
At the start of January 2020, Roatsey messaged one girl he thought was 16 and another girl he believed was also a minor while pretending to be 18 years old on Snapchat, prosecutors said. He admitted that he convinced both girls to record themselves by making sexually explicit videos that show the girls masturbating, prosecutors said.
He also admitted that he sent videos back where he was masturbating.
He then used his Snapchat account to message several other girls he knew from Pinch Elementary that included more than 100 videos he recorded while communicating with two of the girls, who were both around 12 years old, the feds said. One of the victims was a student at Pinch Elementary at the time, prosecutors said.
He received numerous videos of the girls performing what he called “sexy” dances or gymnastic poses like full backbends, according to prosecutors. The girls only wore the athletic bras and shorts on video while Roatsey admitted to telling the girls they were “hot” and “sexy.”
Prosecutors reportedly said that Roatsey confessed to distributing, receiving and owning child pornography, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of West Virginia. He pleaded guilty to child exploitation crimes this year.
Roatsey attempted to cover up his crimes by deleting his Snapchat account shortly after DHS agents searched his home in Oct. 2021 and seized electronic devices in his home with child porn on them.
Roatsey will have a lifetime of supervised release when he gets out of prison in 25 years. He will be required to be registered as a sex offender and pay victims $23,000 in restitution, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“As an elementary school counselor, Roatsey intentionally placed himself in a position of trust over the kinds of children to whom he was sexually attracted,” U.S. Attorney Will Thompson said in a statement, adding that the former school counselor’s actions were “horrific.”
“In our communities, schools are the only constant for a lot of children. A lot of the time, school is the safe place. The fact that Mr. Roatsey made this not a safe place was, I find, to be very horrific,” he explained.
Last week, Townhall covered how a high school basketball coach and school monitor in Martin County, Florida, was arrested for allegedly paying underage girls to send him nude photos on Snapchat. The Martin County Sheriff’s Office reportedly got an anonymous tip about the coach, 28-year-old Alton Edwards, and spoke with seven teenagers who claim they sent him explicit photos.
"Our theory is that he probably [took a] screenshot, saved some of those pictures, and that when we serve the search warrant, we will find them on his camera," Sheriff William Snyder told reporters, adding that it appeared to be a “known secret” among students for years that , but no one spoke up.
If your children have Snapchat, go home tonight and delete it,” the sheriff said.
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What Education Issues Did Voters Care About Most?
Critical race theory, LGBTQ issues, and “political indoctrination”—hot topics in the national media over the past year—did not rank as the most pressing issues for voters in the 2022 midterm elections, a new poll suggests.
But the political divide over those issues remains significant. More than 40 percent of voters still labeled fears of indoctrination, critical race theory, and LGBTQ agendas as a major factor in their election decisions, according to results from the poll.
The National Education Association surveyed 1,200 midterm voters—including an even share of Republicans, Democrats, and independents, from Nov. 10 through Nov. 19—about the education issues that were most important to them.
Forty-three percent of respondents identified the statement that “too many schools are teaching critical race theory to be politically correct” as a major factor in their voting decisions, while 42 percent identified “students are being indoctrinated by radical left-wing teachers” and “teachers are grooming students and pushing the radical LGBTQ agenda” as major factors.
Those concerns, however, did not rank in the top five of major issues for voters. The most pressing issue was school shootings, with 60 percent of voters identifying it as a major factor. Fifty-five percent of voters identified students not receiving “a complete, honest history of our country, including on topics like slavery, the civil rights movement, and Native American history” as a major factor in their vote. And 55 percent of voters also said concerns about school funding and book bans were major factors in their votes.
The NEA is the largest national teachers’ union and overwhelmingly supports Democratic political candidates and issues. The union views the poll results as an indication that issues like school safety and funding are more important to voters than issues promoted in the campaigns of politically conservative candidates.
“We ended up seeing that voters voted for candidates and for issues that … supported strong schools, that supported working families, that wanted people to support our students, their children,” NEA President Becky Pringle said in an interview. “I’m not surprised that’s what ended up happening.”
But education advocates who are politically conservative also see the results as an indication that their issues are resonating with voters.
In both statewide and local elections, people who were worried about critical race theory were not significantly more motivated to vote than those who were not afraid of it.
Sixty-two percent of people who identified themselves as having an “unfavorable” view of critical race theory said they were more motivated or enthusiastic to vote in the midterms. On the other hand, 60 percent of people who identified themselves as having a favorable view of critical race theory also said they were more motivated or enthusiastic about voting in this election.
The numbers showed similar trends in school board elections. In total, 40 percent of respondents said that school board elections were more important this year than in past years. Seventy-eight percent of the respondents in total voted in school board elections.
Of those in favor of critical race theory, 33 percent said school board elections were more important than in past years and 80 percent actually voted in the school board elections. At the same time, 48 percent of people who were worried about critical race theory said the school board elections were more important than in past years, and 79 percent actually voted for school board members.
Pringle views the poll results as a clear signal that voters rejected the idea that critical race theory was a reason why people would vote for more politically conservative candidates.
“It went to that place of, ‘that’s not what we want,’” she said. “We want our kids to learn about each other and to know each other so they can grow and learn and be in a cooperative space with each other.”
But some education advocates disagree.
Lindsey Burke, director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy think tank, said the results show that “the values schools are disseminating to students matter greatly to parents, and that a perceived misalignment in those values continues to motivate many parents at the ballot box.”
"[Policymakers] should work at every turn to empower families with transparency around what is being taught in public schools,” Burke said in a statement.
The poll results are in line with what the NEA saw in its own campaign efforts during the midterms.
Seventy-one percent of the thousands of candidates endorsed by NEA and its affiliates, who are often liberal-leaning, won their elections. Conservative-leaning organizations, like the 1776 Project and Moms for Liberty, didn’t see the same levels of success, with only about a third of the school board candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project and half for Moms For Liberty winning their elections.
Fifty-seven percent of respondents to the NEA poll said they support public schools in their community and 65 percent said they support local teachers. The results come at a time when education advocates have expressed concerns that politics are driving a wedge between educators and their communities.
The support for teachers is especially high among parents and Democrats. Seventy-one percent of parents said they view local teachers favorably and 84 percent of Democrats said the same. Sixty-one percent of independents and 48 percent of Republicans said they view teachers favorably.
At the same time, most of the respondents—62 percent—view themselves on the same side as teachers when it comes to making decisions about local schools and education policy. Eighty-five percent of those who voted for Democrats said they are on the same side as what most teachers want while 40 percent of those who voted Republican said the same.
“It showed us that parents and educators are united in wanting to see every student succeed,” Pringle said. “They understand it’s not only about their child, it’s about all children.”
The poll showed that politicians should listen to educators, parents, and education experts if they want to win over voters, Pringle said.
“If you listen to the people who are impacted by the policies and those who have dedicated their lives to educating America’s students, then you not only will develop good policy and a vision for what public education can and should be, but people will hear it and they’ll vote for you,” she said.
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December 22, 2022
Indiana School Board, Superintendent Refuse to Explain Secret Transgender Policy to Parents
The school board and superintendent of an Indiana school district refused to comment Monday on a recently uncovered transgender policy for students that keeps parents in the dark, nearly two weeks after a public meeting at which parents demanded that officials explain why they’re hiding information.
Concerned parents in Pendleton, Indiana, flocked to the Dec. 8 school board meeting three days after The Daily Signal exposed the school district’s secret policy and a so-called Gender Support Plan for transitioning students.
School Board President Joel Sandefur, other school board members, Schools Superintendent Mark Hall, and one of his assistants all refused to respond to The Daily Signal’s latest request for answers to five key questions about the secret policy before Monday’s publication deadline. Those questions are specified below.
“You should be ashamed,” one mother told Hall and the school board at the Dec. 8 meeting. “I trusted you with my children and you lied to me—to us.”
Dozens of parents and other area residents packed the meeting room to obtain information directly from the elected board and Hall, the appointed superintendent of the Pendleton-based school district, known as the South Madison Community School Corporation.
They soon were disappointed, as Sandefur and Hall evaded questions and blamed the district’s secret transgender policy on unrelated federal law and regulations.
Because of illness, this columnist was unable to follow up my Dec. 5 expose in The Daily Signal by attending and reporting immediately on what happened three days later at the school board meeting. Now I am.
The board’s meeting, livestreamed on YouTube, quickly progressed through typical meeting minutes and updates.
Then, after a short break, Hall read a prepared statement. In it, the superintendent claimed that because the South Madison school district accepts federal funding, the district is required to follow a nondiscrimination policy, which appears as a “Non-Discrimination Statement” on its website. That statement refers to federal nondiscrimination law as well as, incongruously, Department of Agriculture regulations.
South Madison, the superintendent of schools intoned, would not discriminate based on sex, color, age, national origin, gender identity, etc.
To comply with that law and those rules, Hall said, the school system must treat all students equally with regard to “preferred names,” equating a student’s asking to be called by a shortened name or nickname to a student’s changing names and personal pronouns as a result of a gender transition.
The superintendent didn’t connect this explanation to parents’ deep concern about the school district’s withholding information from parents in any way. Hall also offered no explanation as to why a blank form used by the district for transitioning students, called the Gender Support Plan, isn’t accessible online.
Before I go into more detail, some background:
The Daily Signal reported Dec. 5 that the South Madison school district had implemented the secret transgender policy and Gender Support Plan.
Under the policy, the superintendent’s office orders counselors and teachers to refrain from mentioning a “transitioning” student’s new personal pronouns or name to his parents—much less check that parents are even aware that their child believes he or she is transgender.
School counselor Kathy McCord went on the record with The Daily Signal to outline the shady methods the school district employed to keep the so-called Gender Support Plan away from teachers and parents. McCord also described how she was ordered to compel speech from teachers by requiring them to use one set of names and pronouns with students and another with parents.
The Daily Signal reported that McCord and another counselor, who chose to remain anonymous, expressed distress at the district policy. They said that they became school counselors to work with students and parents, not to come between them.
McCord told The Daily Signal that Assistant Superintendent Andrew Kruer, Hall’s subordinate, had informed all counselors that this procedure of keeping information from parents was a school board-approved policy. Kruer also told counselors that the district’s legal counsel, LGBTQ+ advocate Jessica Heiser, had informed the counseling staff it was federal law.
Amanda Keegan, a geography and psychology teacher at the district’s Pendleton Heights High School, told The Daily Signal that the secret transgender policy was one reason she resigned. Keegan said it made her physically ill to lie to parents’ faces about their children.
“When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach,” she said. “I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again.”
Before publishing its initial report, The Daily Signal sought comment from Hall, Kruer, and Sandefur, the school board president. All three flatly refused to provide comments or explanations about South Madison’s student gender policies.
One school board member, Kaye Wolverton, said that she was unaware of any Gender Support Plan or policy to keep information from parents—but that she never would have approved either.
At one point during his prepared statement to parents, Hall, appointed by the board in 2020, said the district didn’t ask or allow counselors or teachers to diagnose or treat gender dysphoria, which conflicts with expectations set forth for counseling staff in the district’s Gender Support Plan as well as the information provided by McCord.
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The Transgender Trajectory
The children had gathered that day for the first time in their first-grade classroom. At the top of the agenda: learn how to do simple problems in addition and subtraction.
After the teacher had reviewed some basic principles of arithmetic, she asked one of the students: "Do you know what one plus one equals?"
The little girl responded: "Two."
The teacher then admonished her: "No, it equals three."
The girl was astonished, but the teacher was adamant. "One plus one equals three," the teacher insisted.
But the little girl was very bright. She held up her right hand where the teacher could see it. "Teacher," she said, grabbing her index finger, "that is one."
Then the girl reached over and grabbed the next finger. "That is another one," she told the teacher. "So now I am holding two."
"I told you and you need to listen," the teacher admonished the little girl. "The fact of the matter is that one plus one equals three -- and you need to accept that."
The little girl looked at the teacher in astonishment and disbelief.
"One plus one equals three," the teacher repeated. "That is the official policy of this school district."
This may not have started happening yet in America's first-grade classrooms, but a similar phenomenon is already taking place in high school athletic competitions.
In 2013, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference adopted what is referred to as its "Revised Transgender Participation Policy."
This "policy," it says, "addresses eligibility determinations for students who have a gender identity that is different from the gender listed on their birth certificates."
"Therefore, for purposes of sports participation, the CIAC shall defer to the determination of the student and his or her local school regarding gender identification," it continues. "In this regard, the school district shall determine a student's eligibility to participate in CIAC gender specific sports team(s) based on the gender identification of that student in current school records and daily life activities in the school and community at the time that sports eligibility is determined for a particular season.
"Accordingly, when a school district submits a roster to the CIAC, it is verifying that it has determined that the students listed on a gender specific sports team are entitled to participate on that team due to their gender identity," says the policy.
In plain English: A boy who "identifies" as a girl is "entitled" to compete against girls on the girls' "gender specific sports team."
Yes, in Connecticut high school sports, one plus one equals three. Or a boy is a girl if he says he is.
How has this impacted girls' sports in Connecticut?
The case of Soule v. Connecticut Association of Schools is now working its way up through the federal courts. The plaintiffs are four biological females who were high school track-and-field athletes.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, which is advancing the female athletes' case, filed a brief last year in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that summarized the basic facts behind it.
"Biological males, if allowed to compete, will dominate women's sports," said the ADF brief. "That is exactly what happened in Connecticut's high school track and field."
In 2017, said the ADF brief, "a biological male athlete who identified as female started running in women's track and field."
In 2018, the ADF noted, "another biological male athlete who identified as female, switched from competing in boys' track to girls' track events."
The result? Over the course of two years, the ADF informed the court, "two biologically male athletes, won 13 girls' state-championship titles and occupied more than 68 opportunities to advance to and participate in exclusive higher-level competitions -- opportunities that would otherwise have gone to females."
These two biologically male athletes, ADF told the court, "won 13 out of 14 'girls' championships, leaving a female runner to win just one. (Needless to say, in the boys division, males won all 14 parallel 'boys' championships.)"
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its opinion in this case last week, dismissing the case brought by the biologically female athletes.
"Plaintiffs allege that the Policy violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 ... because the participation of transgender females in girls' high school athletic events results in 'students who are born female' having materially fewer opportunities for victory, public recognition, athletic scholarships, and future employment 'than students who are born male,'" the court summarized in its opinion.
"To remedy the alleged Title IX violations," the court said, "Plaintiffs requested damages and two injunctions -- one to enjoin future enforcement of the Policy and one to alter the records of certain prior CIAC-sponsored girls' track events to remove the records achieved by two transgender girls, who intervened in this action."
The court's opinion meticulously refers to two types of "girls." One it calls "transgender girls" or "girls who are transgender." The other it calls "cisgender girls" or "girls who are cisgender."
In other words, in this court's arithmetic, two distinct sexes equal one.
Noting that the biological females who brought this case did sometimes defeat the "transgender girls" they were forced to compete against, the court concluded: "Plaintiffs' theory of injury in fact -- that the Policy deprived them of a 'chance to be champions' -- fails because they have not alleged a cognizable deprivation here."
The trajectory of the transgender movement is driving America away from a society based on objective truth -- where a boy is a boy, for example -- toward a society where what we pretend is true depends on what those in authority demand.
https://townhall.com/columnists/terryjeffrey/2022/12/21/the-transgender-trajectory-n2617395
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Biden Administration Investigates Texas Schools for Removal of sexually deviant books
The Department of Education is launching a civil rights investigation into a Texas school district for the removal of books with sexually explicit content from school libraries.
The Office of Civil Rights’ investigation of the Granbury Independent School District, which educates just fewer than 7,000 students about 40 miles west of Fort Worth, comes in response to a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
The ACLU of Texas argues the removal of the books constitutes a Title IX violation on “the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation” because all target books were “related to LGBTQ+ inclusion.”
The Texas Tribune calls the investigation the “first-of-its-kind” that explicitly centers a civil right investigation around the removal of books from a library, since liberal literature and curricula in schools have galvanized activists across the country to protest the “gender ideology” and “critical race theory” being taught.
In January, the district’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, instructed librarians to remove books dealing with “transgender, LGBTQ, and sex [and] sexuality,” according to an audio recording that was leaked in March to NBC News, ProPublica, and the Texas Tribune.
Citing parental concerns, Mr. Glenn asked for the removal of more than 100 books in the school library — including “This Book Is Gay,” a resource book for teenagers on coming out that has become a focus of parental rights activists across the country. The book contains chapters titled, “Where to Meet People Like You,” which advises readers on how to use gay dating apps such as Grinder, and, “The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex,” which instructs readers on sexual acts.
“I don’t want a kid picking up a book — whether it’s about homosexuality or heterosexuality — and reading about how to hook up sexually in our libraries,” Mr. Glenn told the librarians, before affirming that “there are two genders.”
“Granbury is a very, very conservative community,” Mr. Glenn told librarians, stopping short of accusing them of subverting communal norms. “If it is not what you believe, you better hide it. Because it ain’t changing in Granbury.”
The ACLU’s complaint accused Mr. Glenn of creating “a chilling atmosphere” for gay and transgender students.
“The atmosphere created by Superintendent Glenn’s comments and by the book removals remains — a school environment that is pervasively hostile to LGBTQ+ and especially transgender and non-binary students,” the organization wrote in its complaint, filed in July.
More than 100 books were temporarily removed from the shelves, but most of them returned after a volunteer committee reviewed the content — including “Being Jazz: My Life as a Transgender Teen” and “Safe Sex 101: An Overview for Teens.” Meanwhile, “This Book Is Gay” and several other titles remain out of the school libraries.
The intervention by the Biden administration in the policy disagreement between school librarians and parents is illustrative of the growing tension between conservative parents and liberal educators — fueled by Covid school closures and ideologically driven lessons on race and gender.
While Granbury is a city, a recent study by Jay Greene of the Heritage Foundation and Ian Kingsbury of the Educational Freedom Institute found stark differences in political values between teachers and other residents in rural Texas counties.
In the most recent gubernatorial election, more than 90 percent of campaign donations from public school employees in rural areas went to Democratic candidates. Governor Abbott, a Republican, cruised to victory in the same areas, winning more than 80 percent of the vote.
Two rising Republican stars, Governors Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have both hitched their wagons to the movement of parents asking for more oversight of their children’s education.
Political analysts attributed Mr. Youngkin’s 2021 electoral victory to the mutual support between the candidate and parent activists. Mr. Youngkin campaigned on promises to involve parents in their children’s classrooms and to “ban critical race theory on day one.”
His Democratic opponent, Governor McAuliffe, was criticized for his support of teachers unions and opposition to parental involvement in curricula. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he said during one debate.
In a statement, the ACLU of Texas praised the Department of Education for looking into the possible Title IX violation.
“By choosing to open this investigation in response to our complaint, the federal government is signaling that remedying discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students is a top priority and that school districts cannot deny students the right to be themselves in school, be it through book bans, discriminatory comments, or other harmful policies,” the group said.
https://www.nysun.com/article/biden-administration-investigates-texas-schools-for-removal-of-books ?
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December 21, 2022
University of Oklahoma bans TikTok after Gov. Stitt's executive order cites 'national security concerns'
The University of Oklahoma will be banning the use of the social media app TikTok for students and staff, according to an email sent out to students on Tuesday.
In an email, the school said it would be barring internet access for the app in lieu of Governor Kevin Stitt’s executive order banning TikTok on state devices.
"In compliance with the Governor’s Executive Order 2022-33, effective immediately, no University employee or student shall access the TikTok application or website on University-owned or operated devices, including OU wired and wireless networks," David Horton, the Chief Information Officer and Senior Associate Vice President, wrote in the letter sent to students on Dec. 20.
"As a result of the Executive Order, access to the TikTok platform will be blocked and cannot be accessed from the campus network," the letter continued. "University-administered TikTok accounts must be deleted and alternate social media platforms utilized in their place."
The letter goes on to state TikTok, which operates under the control of the Chinese government, was banned by the governor due to "ongoing national and cybersecurity concerns with the TikTok application."
"Thank you for your cooperation," Horton concluded.
Gov. Stitt, a Republican, wrote an executive order on Dec. 8 that banned TikTok for all "state government agencies, employees and contractors on government networks or government-issued devices."
The devices include "state-issued cellphones, computers, or any other device capable of internet connectivity," he ordered.
"We will not participate in helping the Chinese Communist Party gain access to government information," Stitt said at the time.
"Maintaining the cybersecurity of state government is necessary to continue to serve and protect Oklahoma citizens and we will not participate in helping the Chinese Communist Party gain access to government information," the governor added.
Immediately following the governor's order, Northeastern State University, a public university located in Tahlequah, also banned the app.
NSU's University Relations department emailed students, staff, and faculty notifying them of the policy change on Dec. 9.
The email instructed employees and student organizations using official NSU TikTok accounts devices to delete them and to delete the app if "housed on NSU-owned, leased, or managed devices," according to the Tahlequah Daily Press.
"Northeastern State University is complying with Gov. Stitt's Executive Order 2022-33," wrote Dan Mabery, the Vice President for University Relations. "Therefore, university-owned/leased/managed equipment, including the NSU network, may not be used to download or access the TikTok application or website. As a result of the Executive Order, access to the TikTok social media platform will be blacklisted and cannot be accessed from the campus network."
Both President Biden and former President Donald Trump have raised issues with TikTok being used in the United States, similarly citing national security and surveillance issues, with the latter attempting to ban the app in its entirety.
TikTok is a social media app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It is commonly used by younger generations that allow users to share short videos with annotations or captions or virtually any topic.
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New Case Filed: Phillips v. North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed suit in state court Friday on behalf of a professor whom the North Carolina Governor’s School fired after he spoke out about the harms of the racially divisive ideology embraced by the school. Dr. David Phillips is a well-respected English professor who has spent eight summers teaching at the Governor’s School, a residential summer program for the state’s most talented rising high-school seniors.
For years, Phillips spoke out against the school’s increasing adoption of critical theory, an ideology that views everyone and everything through the lens of characteristics like race, sex, and religion, labeling people as perpetual oppressors or victims based on group membership alone. After Phillips delivered three optional seminars in June 2021 critiquing critical theory and the increasing bias and lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education, North Carolina public school officials fired him mid-session without any explanation.
“In an academic environment committed to exploring a wide range of differing viewpoints, as the Governor’s School claims to be, no teacher should be fired for offering a reasoned critique of critical theory. But that’s what happened to Dr. Phillips,” said ADF Senior Counsel Hal Frampton. “There is no lawful explanation for the way North Carolina public school officials treated Dr. Phillips. He was beloved, respected, and regarded by both students and faculty as an advocate for students who felt that their voices weren’t being heard and their perspectives weren’t welcomed at the Governor’s School. By firing him, the Governor’s School violated his constitutional right to free speech and unlawfully retaliated against him for deviating from the Governor’s School’s ideological orthodoxy.”
Over his eight years teaching at the Governor’s School, Phillips has encouraged his students to think for themselves and has notified the administration of the hostility that he and other students with “privileged” characteristics experienced. Phillips’ three optional seminars, which were similar to others he’d delivered in previous years and open to any student or staff member to attend if they so desired, discussed (1) a social psychology critique of some concepts from critical theory; (2) understanding speech through the lens of speech-act theory; and (3) the increasing ideological bias and lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education.
Following these lectures, a group of students and staff members reacted with open hostility, referencing race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion in their comments and questions. Despite the hostility, Phillips stayed long after the conclusion of each lecture to answer questions, even offering to meet with students later for further discussion. The day after Phillips’ third optional seminar, the Governor’s School fired him without warning or explanation. When he asked why, he was told no explanation would be given, and that there was no appeal or other recourse. Phillips had always received glowing performance reviews without a single negative comment up until the point of the lectures.
ADF attorneys filed the lawsuit, Phillips v. North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, in the Superior Court for Wake County, North Carolina.
Alliance Defending Freedom: info@adflegal.org
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University student banned from classes after she questioned the lecturer's controversial views about Australia
A mature-aged university student has been banned from class and told to take a re-education course for questioning her lecturer's anti-Australian views.
Grandmother Rae Rancie expressed her disagreement with some assertions made by her lecturer in the 'Politics of Indigenous Australia' unit at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
The lecturer allegedly said that Australia was a 's***hole country', that 'white people think they are the most superior race on the planet' and the country 'baulked at the thought of Peter Dutton as prime minister'.
For questioning the tutor's narrative, the grandmother claims she was on the receiving end of a lengthy diatribe and prohibited from attending class.
'I have been banned from classes, I had to listen online to a recording, and I was shocked,' she told Andrew Bolt on his Sky News Australia program.
'To be the subject of a nine-minute humiliating tirade from the lecturer calling me 'a difficult student', 'that person', I was 'making her go crazy,' I was 'a real life example of racism and disrespectful behaviour,' how she encourages speech in her workshops, but not my type of speech.'
But Ms Rancie admitted to also making some more controversial statements during her class, which fuelled her tutor's heated response.
While her class spoke about the Stolen Generation, Ms Rancie said: 'I don't think they are stolen anymore. They get taken away from harmful situations. It's the government's responsibility to do it.'
She also suggested that parents 'failing to look after their children' was the reason why so many indigenous children were in detention.
The problematic comments got Ms Rancie banned from class, and she was also advised to take a re-education course. But when she applied to do the re-education course she 'heard crickets'.
Ms Rancie said one one of the reasons she chose to continue questioning her lecturer's narrative was because other students in her class told her in private that they agreed with her.
After passing the class, Ms Rancie sent her lecturer an email wishing her a Merry Christmas and attached a video of Aboriginal senator Jacinta Price speaking.
She explained that she asked her lecturer in the email to look at 'both sides of the argument'. 'I've been told that that was very intimidating and I'm in line for another disciplinary process,' Ms Rancie said.
La Trobe University told Daily Mail Australia in a statement: 'As a university La Trobe welcomes and encourages diverse and opposing views and opinions, however we expect debate to be conducted in a respectful manner.'
'If a student behaves disruptively or disrespectfully towards others in class, we will take necessary disciplinary action, including requiring the student to attend a course in respectful behaviour.'
'As this particular matter is subject to ongoing investigation, we cannot comment further.'
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20 December, 2022
Texas Legislation Strikes Back Against University-Backed Discrimination
Texas state Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock County, has introduced legislation to abolish “diversity, equity, and inclusion” departments and programs in public universities.
The two-page piece of legislation removes the universities’ ability to fund, promote, sponsor, or support any department, program, or office that “funds, sponsors, or supports an initiative or formulation of diversity, equity, and inclusion beyond what is necessary to uphold the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
Universities taking money from the Texas government would no longer be allowed to promote or decry any group based on their immutable characteristics. Specifically, the bill would prevent any university from officially endorsing, dissuading, or interfering with any “lifestyle, race, sex, religion, or culture.”
Tepper’s bill follows a flood of woke, pro-segregation activism from progressives across the nation in the last few years. Racially-charged policies under the guise of “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” have become all too common.
Since 2020, several universities have created task forces or departments to combat “white supremacy” on their campuses. At Arizona State University in 2021, progressive students accosted two white students for sitting in their DEI office-endorsed “multicultural space.” Dozens of speaking events have been canceled by university administrations for not being diverse, equitable, or inclusive enough.
Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, elaborates:
DEI offices have been used to enforce a favored political orthodoxy and activism, rather than foster viewpoint diversity. They are heavy on identity politics and light on free expression. Campus surveys find DEI offices and their vast bureaucracies fail to improve the campus climate for students. Instead, they contribute to ever-growing college administrative bloat, funded by taxpayers.
Rep. Tepper told The Daily Signal that the time for a bill that fights back against state-funded discrimination is now. “Departments are running amuck practicing ‘reverse racism’,” Tepper said.
Tepper pointed to one example from Texas Tech University, in which the college’s Division of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion encouraged students to “understand [their] personal relationship to white supremacy and anti-Black racism.” The “#Academics4BlackLives” program encourages black students at Texas Tech to withdraw into black communities, blaming other cultural groups for societal issues.
Tepper warned, “It’s one thing to understand the different experiences we all have—that’s obvious, but encouraging more racism doesn’t help any situation.”
In 2021, the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion staff at Texas Tech held an “anti-racism” training in which students were forcibly segregated by color.
When asked what the role of activism on college campuses was to be in light of this piece of legislation, Tepper responded, “Students should feel free to form any group they want, but I don’t believe in [Texas] funding segregation.”
While the bill is expected to be a tough fight in the Texas House, Tepper remains confident that H.B. 1006 is exactly what Lone Star universities need: “Keep your eye out; the public’s fed up. A lot of tax dollars are flowing into these universities, and with tuition skyrocketing—dollars should go to operating costs and education, not woke activism.”
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Scotland: A law student who sued her university after it launched a disciplinary investigation for saying women have vaginas' during a class on transgender issues has had her case dismissed
Mother-of-two Lisa Keogh, 30, was investigated by Abertay University in Dundee during the summer after classmates complained that she made 'hateful, discriminatory, sexist, racist and transphobic' remarks during an online seminar on gender politics.
She was cleared of the misconduct charges after the university's disciplinary board found there was no evidence that she had discriminated against anyone during a two-month probe - which took place while she underwent her final year exams this year.
Ms Keogh launched legal action claiming that the institution broke the Equality Act 2010 by pursuing her for 'expressing her gender critical beliefs' and caused 'stress at the most crucial part of my university career', but her case was dismissed by Dundee Sheriff Court.
Sheriff Gregor Murray dismissed the bid and upheld submissions made by lawyers acting for Abertay last week, saying the university 'was entitled to take steps to investigate complaints'.
The mature student said she is considering an appeal against the ruling and thanked her supporters. She said: 'We are very disappointed with this result and I am currently considering an appeal. I will be meeting with my legal team to discuss moving forward.
'I want to thank everyone for the tremendous support you have given me so far both moral and financial. I hope you will continue to support me moving forward. 'We are currently planning on moving platforms for crowdfunding which will make donating much easier. Thank you all.'
Supporters of gender critical views believe people cannot change sex.
In his written judgment, Sheriff Murray said: 'The defender was entitled to take steps to investigate complaints.
'It could not be guilty of discrimination simply because it did so. Following investigation in this case, the complaint against the pursuer was not upheld.'
Miss Keogh previously argued that the university's actions had amounted to 'a direct attack on my right to free speech'.
She also said she was the victim of a 'modern day witch-hunt' and that the complaints were 'groundless' and the process 'needlessly cruel'.
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Harvard’s Latest Discrimination Problem: Antisemitism
While Harvard University is currently before the Supreme Court defending its admissions policies that discriminate against Asian and white students, a recently released report found that the Ivy League university is suffering from discrimination of another kind: antisemitism.
An annual report for the year 2021 released by the AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to combating antisemitism, ranked Harvard as the top school for “assaults on Jewish identity.” With 25 incidents reported, Harvard’s total nearly doubled the University of Chicago, which came in second with 13 incidents in 2021, with instances of antisemitism split into three categories: redefinition, denigration and suppression.
The AMCHA defines redefinition as the belief that Zionism and Judaism have nothing to do with each other and that support of Israel is a “colonial political project that exploits Judaism,” while denigration is the attempt to vilify those who do support Israel or Jews with “undue privilege, power or influence.” Suppression calls for boycotting, divesting, and sometimes shutting down events, programs, or beliefs that are deemed Zionist, according to the group.
Harvard had 14 incidents of redefinition, 16 of denigration and 13 of suppression in 2021, according to AMCHA’s report, with many of the incidents overlapping all three categories.
AMCHA Director Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told the Daily Caller News Foundation that universities have a hard time “spotting antisemitism.”
“The massive assault on Jewish identity — attempts to chisel away and erase students’ connection to their Jewish faith, people, and history — on campuses across the country is no coincidence,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “It is the latest strategy adopted by those who traffic in antisemitism, whether from the right or the left, to further normalize antisemitism and make it easier to harass, bully and abuse Jews on campus, and harder for Jewish students to seek recourse.”
Two Jewish Harvard students, Zachary Lech and Alex Bernat, told DCNF expressed that during their time at the university antisemitism was not uncommon and realized that it was also not a priority for the administration.
“Harvard wants to shine [a light] on what is currently popular without necessarily taking into consideration the practical ramifications,” Lech, who is a also CAMERA Campus Fellow, said. “They are less, in my view, interested about actual wellbeing as they are in looking good.”
“Quite frankly, the easiest way to frame it is Jews look white and, therefore, you know, it doesn’t work. They don’t care,” Bernat explained.
Bernat and Lech mentioned an event on campus involving Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd, who is originally from Eastern Jerusalem and previously called Zionism a “death cult,” “murderous,” “genocidal” and “sadistic,” according to the Jewish News Syndicate.
During the event, a Jewish student, who is a close friend of Bernat, asked El-Kurd to condemn the acts of terrorism committed by Palestinians against Jewish citizens in Israel. El-Kurd refused and “got tons of applause for it,” Bernat stated.
While Lech and Bernat stated they believe everyone has the right to speak and give their opinion on a subject, both expressed frustration that their concerns about rhetoric like El-Kurd’s were not taken seriously. Lech said the university had a pattern of responding to the concerns of other marginalized groups, but not to the Jewish community.
“My cynical answer would be that yes to some extent Harvard is very comfortable to allow this kind of discrimination to happen on campus just because it’s [commitment] to issues regarding DEI is superficial at best and more done out of a sense that this is what is socially accepted these days and not out of genuine concern for the well being of any group,” Lech said.
Bernat told the DCNF that one of the pro-Palestine groups was allowed to hold this year’s annual “Israel Apartheid Week” during the Jewish holiday of Passover from Apr. 18-22. The Hillel chapter on campus held a “Stand With Israel” rally to combat “the anti-Israel apartheid week,” according to the university’s student newspaper the Harvard Crimson.
Bernat said Jewish high school seniors looking to attend the prestigious university should be aware of what they are walking into. He clarified that most of the time it’s fine, but when it’s not it’s hard to ignore.
“If someone’s Jewish identity is strongly tied to Israel it must feel like a dangerous space,” Lech said.
Rossman-Benjamin noted that a “new solution” was needed.
“University administrators must acknowledge that harassment and bullying that denies Jewish students – or any student – of the ability to fully participate in campus life should never be tolerated, and they must establish a singe behavioral standard for responding to harassing behavior, irrespective of the motivation of the perpetrator or the identity of the victim,” she stated.
El-Kurd, and Harvard did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/12/18/harvards-discrimination-problem-affirmative-action-report/
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19 December, 2022
Affordability Remains Top Consideration on Where and Whether Students Attend College
Survey results released this summer by EAB of nearly 5,000 students who graduated from high school in 2021 revealed that test-optional admissions policies have had significant DEI impacts on college applications.
Overall, 15% of Gen Z students say they applied to a school specifically because it did not require them to submit an SAT or ACT score with their application. Black and Hispanic/Latinx students were much more likely (24% and 21%, respectively) than their White or Asian counterparts (12% and 15%, respectively) to apply to a school because of its test-optional policy.
“The majority of higher ed institutions suspended or permanently discontinued testing requirements during the pandemic, and many schools still do not require students to submit SAT or ACT scores,” said EAB’s dean of enrollment management Madeleine Rhyneer. “Unfortunately, schools aren’t doing a very good job of making it clear to students whether their institution is test-optional for every academic program and scholarship. Schools looking to diversify enrollment would be well-served by clarifying and promoting their testing policies.”
The new EAB survey also showed that college affordability continues to be the top consideration in whether and where students apply and enroll. Thirtysix percent say they picked their institution for its “affordable tuition.” Roughly one-third of Black (32%) and Hispanic/Latinx (35%) respondents who decided not to attend college this year said that cost concerns drove their decision.
As the number of high school graduates who enroll in college continues to decline, schools are getting more creative in how they attract and engage prospective students. Some have begun offering $1,000 “bonus” scholarships, added to the aid package when a student enrolls, to incentivize applicants to make a campus visit. This bonus scholarship incentive was favored by 64% of EAB survey respondents, making it far more popular than other potential choices, including free school apparel (39%) or reimbursement for campus visit travel costs (39%).
Not all students are interested or able to make in-person campus visits a staple of their college search experience. Seventy-five percent of survey respondents said they took at least one virtual campus tour during 2021, a 50% increase from the 2020 school year.
“Getting a prospective student to visit your campus in person has been a staple of college recruiting for years,” Rhyneer added. “It makes perfect sense since a campus visit is strongly correlated with a student’s decision to enroll. However, since many families lack the resources or flexibility to travel, creating an effective virtual tour of your campus has become critically important, especially for schools looking to diversify their applicant pool.”
EAB collected survey responses from 4,848 students who graduated from high school in 2021. The report also includes analysis of student behavioral data from more than 1,100 partner colleges and universities.
From kindergarten to college to career, EAB partners with leaders and practitioners to accelerate progress and drive results across five major areas: enrollment, student success, institutional strategy, data analytics, and DEI.
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Bill to ban biological males from girls' sports teams fails in Ohio General Assembly
A bill that would have banned biological males from playing on girls' sports teams in Ohio failed to pass in the state's General Assembly last Thursday.
The amended bill, which cleared the state Senate, 23-7, before it narrowly fell in the statehouse, would also have given the governor greater power over the state Department of Education and banned discrimination against students based on COVID-19 vaccination status.
Republican state Rep. Jena Powell introduced the transgender student-athlete amendment to the bill, which was originally intended to address the Ohio Teacher Residency Program.
The amendment said no school or athletic conference "shall permit individuals of the male sex to participate on athletic teams or in athletic competitions designated only for participants of the female sex."
A provision in the bill that would have mandated students undergo "internal and external" exams to determine their biological sex was taken out of the bill earlier this month. A subsequent provision was also removed that would have required student-athletes whose "sex is disputed" to prove their biological sex with a birth certificate.
Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, though he voiced support for overhauling education oversight, has previously expressed his opinion that Ohio legislators should not be addressing the issue of transgender students in sports.
"This issue is best addressed outside of government through individual sports leagues and athletic associations, including the Ohio High School Athletic Association, who can tailor policies to meet the needs of their member athletes and member institutions," DeWine has said.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association has said there is no evidence that biological males who identify as transgender are posing a problem and that there are few transgender student-athletes in the state.
There have been 15 transgender student-athletes in Ohio since the 2015-2016 school year, with seven transgender females in high school sports and eight transgender females at the seventh- and eighth-grade level, according to the association.
Despite the bill's failure, some form of it could be taken up again during the next legislative session, when Republicans will hold a firmer majority in the state House of Representatives. Republicans presently hold 64 of the House's 99 seats and will pick up three more next year.
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Ohio teacher says she was forced to resign after telling principal using students' preferred pronouns violated her religion
A former Ohio middle school teacher said she was forced to resign after telling the principal that she would not address students by their preferred pronouns because of her religious beliefs.
Vivian Geraghty, 24, is now engaged in a lawsuit against the Jackson Memorial Middle School principal, the Board of Education, and two employees of the school district.
Geraghty, who is Christian, worked at the Massillon, Ohio school teaching art until her abrupt resignation on August 26.
The school had adopted a policy that said its teachers would abide by the wishes of students as far as the names and pronouns they want to be called
The school had adopted a policy that said its teachers would abide by the wishes of students as far as the names and pronouns they want to be called
A federal lawsuit filed last week states that prior to her resignation, she 'taught her class while remaining consistent with her religious practices and scientific understanding concerning human identity, gender, and sex.'
Earlier in August, two of Geraghty's students requested that she begin using names that were consistent 'with their new gender identities rather than their legal names.'
One of the students, according to the suit, also wanted to be addressed by new 'preferred' pronouns. The suit also noted that the school had a policy that required teachers to use the pronouns requested by students.
The policy flouted Geraghty's religious beliefs prompting her to meet with principal Kacy Carter 'in the hope of reaching a solution that would allow her to continue teaching without violating her religious beliefs and constitutional rights.'
Ohio principal Kacy Carter, who allegedly told Geraghty that she would have to change her faith-based beliefs or resign
Ohio principal Kacy Carter, who allegedly told Geraghty that she would have to change her faith-based beliefs or resign
Following her conversation with Carter, Geraghty was called into a separate meeting with the principal and district employee Monica Myers.
During the second meeting, Geraghty was told she would be 'required to put her beliefs aside as a public servant' and any unwillingness to do so would be read as insubordination, according to the lawsuit.
When the teacher held her ground, she was sent back to her classroom only to be pulled out minutes later and instructed to either change her mind, or resign her position.
Feeling as though she had no other option, she opted to resign and submitted a letter of resignation. She was then escorted out of the building.
Attorneys from the Alliance Defending Freedom, which has taken up Geraghty's case, said that the school failed to consider any possibilities that could accommodate Geraghty and her students, like moving her to a different classroom, or having her call students by their last names.
The suit alleges that the school's policy is unevenly enforces given that, Kacy, for instance, is able to avoid using pronouns altogether in his position. The ADF additionally argued that Geraghty should not have been placed in a position where she was required to choose 'between her faith and her job.'
Logan Spena, counsel for the ADF, wrote, 'No school official can force a teacher to set her religious beliefs aside in order to keep her job.'
'The First Amendment prohibits that abuse of power.'
Religious Christians generally take an unsympathetic view toward the transgender movement in the US. According to Focus on the Family, parents and other community leaders - including teachers - should refrain from 'acquiesc(ing)' to the 'gender struggle' some children may experience without 'considering the more important responsibility of shepherding their eternal souls.'
'Putting your acceptance of your children’s preferences and behavior above their relationship with God doesn’t truly help them,' read the site.
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18 December, 2022
Students at "New School" university in New York occupy campus, demand A-grades for everyone
The New School was a haven for Marxism from its beginning. Not much seems to have changed. "New" was once code for "Communist": Now very old and obsolete
Harvey Goldman says he pulled his 9-year-old daughter out of a Manhattan private school saying, ‘little children don’t need to feel bad about the color of their skin.’
Students at an elite, private university in New York City are occupying a campus building with the demand that all be given A grades.
The original reason for The New School occupation, which began on December 8, was to support striking faculty members who were lobbying for higher wages and better health care.
Though the faculty strike has since been resolved, a letter of demands now calls for A grades for all students. It says in part: "We demand that every student receives a final course grade of A as well as the removal of I/Z grades for the Fall 2022 semester." The letter insisted, "Attendance shall have no bearing on course grade." (According to the New School’s website, an "I" grade is a "temporary incomplete" and a "z" grade is an "unofficial withdrawal.")
The letter also states that occupying students demand a refund "for the loss of instructional time due to the strike" and that "this tuition refund will be proportional to the duration of the semester during which the strike is in effect."
Students are also calling for the resignations of the school’s president, provost, vice president and the disbandment of the Board of Trustees. Other demands include a tuition freeze from 2023 to 2028. As reported by The Daily Caller, students are also demanding for the university president’s house "be treated as a communal property."
Assistant Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs Amy Malsin commented to Fox News Digital on the unfolding situation: "The university supports peaceful free expression by our students, and we are listening closely to all of our students' concerns."
She indicated that "faculty retain autonomy about how to conduct and grade their courses."
There are approximately 10,000 students at New School. Tuition is $26,854 a semester or $51,900 for a full year.
According to The New School’s "about" page, the university is committed to "developing students who will have an impact on the world and address the most pressing social issues of our time."
It adds that "this effort is bolstered by the university’s Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice, which is committed to fostering an equitable, inclusive, and socially just environment for our community." Social justice battles have become heated at many universities across the country.
In 2021, a fed-up father pulled his daughter out of Heschel School, an elite New York City private school and moved her to Florida after becoming frustrated with the focus on race-related curriculum. Harvey Goldman told "Fox and Friends First" that "little children don’t need to feel bad about the color of their skin."
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Poisonous Oberlin College FINALLY pays out $25M to Ohio family bakery it tried to destroy with false accusations of racism
Their insane "blacks can do no wrong" ideology finally costs them
Oberlin College has completed paying out a $25million judgment to an Ohio bakery that won a libel lawsuit against the school after a shoplifting incident involving three black students.
The store's owners, Allyn Gibson and his son, David Gibson, sued Oberlin College in 2017, claiming they had been libeled by the school and their business had been harmed following protests over the shoplifting.
Both died before the settlement was reached and had said at the time that the claims had pushed the store to the bring of closure.
The yearlong legal fight involving a school and town known for its liberal leanings erupted into a debate over racism, free speech and political correctness.
A Lorain County jury in 2019 awarded the Gibsons $44 million in damages, which a judge later reduced to $25 million.
The Ohio Supreme Court in August said it would not take up an appeal of the judgment.
All of the money has now been paid, Brandon McHugh, attorney for the Gibsons, told WKYC-TV in Cleveland on Thursday.
In addition to the $25 million judgement, the school paid more than $11 million in attorney fees and interest.
The lawsuit was filed after David Gibson's son, also named Allyn, chased and tackled a black male student he suspected of having stolen a bottle of wine in 2016.
Two black female students who were with the male student tried to intervene. All three were arrested and later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges.
The arrests triggered protests outside Gibson's Bakery where flyers were handed out, some by an Oberlin College vice president and dean of students, accusing the Gibsons of being racist.
A Student Senate resolution condemning the Gibsons was emailed to all students and was posted in a display case at the school's student center, where it remained for a year.
Oberlin College officials ordered its campus food provider to stop buying bakery items from Gibson's.
The two original owners who brought the suit have since died. David Gibson died in November 2019 at age 65. Allyn Gibson died in February. He was 93.
The college had been ordered to pay after jurors ruled that it had defamed Gibson's Bakery by describing the institution as racist, after the storeowner chased down three black students who stole from the business in November 2016.
With legal fees and interest, the amount rose to over $36.5 million.
A lawyer for the bakery celebrated the huge settlement on Thursday. 'With Oberlin's decision to not pursue any additional appeals, the Gibson Family's fight is finally over,' said Brandon McHugh, an attorney for the family. 'Truth still matters, and David has overcome Goliath.'
McHugh said the ruling meant the family firm was saved from collapse.
'While Oberlin College has still refused to admit they were wrong, the jury, a unanimous panel from the court of appeals, and a majority of the Ohio Supreme Court decided otherwise,' he said.
'Now, the Gibsons will be able to rebuild the business their family started 137 years ago and keep the lights on for another generation.'
The anger at Oberlin was whipped up by the former dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, who led the woke mob's attacks against Gibson's - and even turned up outside the business to screech accusations while toting a bullhorn.
While named as a defendant in the suit, she won't have to pay the settlement.
And despite the disgrace she heaped on her former employer, Raimondo has now landed a cozy job at Oglethorpe Liberal Arts College in Atlanta, and has yet to speak out over her role in the costly scandal.
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UC-Berkeley law school under federal investigation after Zionist speakers banned
The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights is opening an investigation into the University of California, Berkeley Law School over its response to several student organizations who adopted a pledge to not invite any Zionist or pro-Israel speaker to give lectures.
Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley Law wrote in an Aug. 21 Instagram post that nine student organizations adopted a "pro-Palestine bylaw" stating that their group "will not" invite speakers who hold views in support of Zionism or "the apartheid state of Israel."
Berkeley Law Muslim Student Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Womxn of Color Collective, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Queer Caucus, Community Defense Project, Women of Berkeley Law, and Law Students of African Descent were among the student organizations who signed the Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley Law pledge.
University of California, Berkeley entrance sign on the corner of Oxford Street and Center Street at Berkeley, California.
University of California, Berkeley entrance sign on the corner of Oxford Street and Center Street at Berkeley, California. (iStock)
A complaint was filed with the Department of Education on Nov. 18 by Gabriel Groisman, an attorney at LSN Law in Miami, and Arsen Ostrovsky, attorney and CEO at International Legal Forum in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The complaint alleges that while Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky condemned the proposed bylaw, he didn't take enough action which is necessary as part of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
"Although we acknowledge that Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law School, has condemned the adopted by-law, describing it as 'very troubling' and noting that according to their framing, he too would be banned because he supports the existence of the State of Israel, he has neither called for their revocation, nor has he taken any meaningful action in response to this egregious act of discrimination, as required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act," the complaint letter states.
The pair of lawyers received a letter from the Department of Education on Tuesday, stating that its Office for Civil Rights will be investigating the issue to determine if the university "failed to respond appropriately" to the incident.
In an Aug. 25 email to leaders of all student organizations, Chemerinsky harshly criticized the bylaw and said he wouldn't be invited to speak at these organizations if the pledge was applied.
"It is troubling to broadly exclude a particular viewpoint from being expressed. Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies," Chemerinsky said.
In a statement on Thursday, Groisman and Ostrovsky applauded the Department of Education's decision to open an investigation.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/uc-berkeley-law-school-federal-investigation-zionist-speakers-banned
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16 December, 2022
Brain Training Doesn’t Work
Scott H. Young
But "knowing stuff" helps
Will mastering chess make you more strategic? Does playing Sudoku speed up your mind? Do brain teasers help you think more logically?
Sadly the answer is: probably not.
From a 2016 review by Simons et al.:
“[W]e find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”
Another study tracked participants over two years of working memory training. They found that the training had no impact on measured intelligence. The authors concluded, “These results question the utility and validity of [working memory] training as means of improving cognitive ability.”
Likewise, Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet performed a meta-analysis on whether studying chess and music affects academic or cognitive skills. They found only minimal effects. Some studies supported benefits from training, but the higher quality the study, the weaker the effect. Summarizing their review, the authors remark that, “this pattern of results casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of chess, music and working memory training.”
It’s easy to see why people are attracted to the idea of brain training. Intelligence is associated with nearly every positive life outcome people experience. A procedure that increases intelligence with only a small amount of daily effort would be life-altering.
Brain training also makes sense if you hold a false (but seductive) view of the mind — the idea that the mind is like a muscle.
The earliest takedown of the mind-muscle metaphor dates to Edward Thorndike. In 1901, he began a series of studies that showed practice on quite similar tasks didn’t lead to improvement in unrelated tasks. Thorndike interpreted his results in terms of identical elements: post training, performance improves on tasks that overlap in the stimulus or response required, but not beyond this.
Summarizing his view, Thorndike wrote, “the mind is so specialized that we alter human nature in small spots.”
Psychology has progressed considerably since Thorndike’s day. Yet the idea that skills are specific is a consistent finding in psychological research. In their 1989 monograph, The Transfer of Cognitive Skill, John Anderson and Mark Singley argued for what amounts to an updated version of Thorndike’s identical elements model. Skills transfer to the extent that the knowledge and procedures used between tasks are the same. If skills rely on different methods or ideas, training in one won’t help with another.
Thorndike’s identical elements model, and modern theories such as Anderson’s ACT-R, show why brain training doesn’t work. But are there any other ways to get smarter?
Does Education Boost Intelligence?
Brain-training fails because it focuses on a very narrow kind of task. Judging a good chess position and good business decision don’t use the same procedure. Thus learning strategy in chess doesn’t make you more strategic or effective in business.
Education doesn’t necessarily suffer the same shortcoming because it aims to impart a much broader set of skills. Algebra might only be suitable for problems that use algebra, according to the identical elements model. But there are lots of problems you can solve with algebra! Similarly, learning to read may not transfer (directly) to other skills, but reading can be a gateway to acquiring knowledge in practically any field.
Stuart Ritchie reviewed studies on the impact of additional years of education. He found that an extra year of schooling was typically associated with 1–5 more IQ points. These studies often rely on a quasi-experimental design. The authors studied situations where a sudden, unexpected change in policy resulted in some people getting more education than others. Testing people just before and after the cutoff let them tease out the effect of education without a formal experiment.
The optimistic take on this research would be that education improves general thinking by equipping people with diverse cognitive tools. This breadth has power. Even if a particular task is only helped by a subset of school training, many years of schooling make an overlap between skills and tasks increasingly likely.
The pessimistic stance would be that education trains you at narrow tricks that work for passing tests — sitting still for a prolonged period, guessing well when you don’t know the answer, watching out for trick questions, etc. — and these tricks also help on IQ tests.
Applications for an Identical Elements View of Learning
My perspective is that the only way to become smarter is by learning. The basic units of learning are specific, but when added together, these specific chunks can become impressive proficiency.
A concrete analogy would be language learning. Fluency isn’t a muscle you improve. It results from knowing many words, grammar, and pronunciations and using that knowledge quickly and unhesitatingly. It can be impressive to watch someone at a mastery level converse in a language you struggle with. Still, there is nothing more to it than this — if you knew everything she did, you too would be fluent.
Similarly, intelligence in real life is about having the vocabulary of methods and knowledge to deal with a wide variety of problems. Each unit of learning may seem unimpressive on its own, but combine enough of those units, and the accumulation is wisdom.
But to achieve this possibility, we must let go of the false promise that broad-ranging skills can come from practice on narrow tasks. Brain training is a dead-end, but learning is timeless.
https://betterhumans.pub/brain-training-doesnt-work-34613651234d
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Teacher Sues Ohio School District After Being Fired for Refusing to Use Preferred Pronouns
Chivalry isn’t dead, apparently.
Although in 2022, chivalry means not holding a door open, but banishing women who refuse to hew to the fashionable ideology of the day from the presence of other women.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, major law firm Hogan Lovells hosted a conference call “billed as a ‘safe space’ for women at the firm,” according to then-employee Robin Keller. (One wonders if Hogan Lovells, whose reported invitation language seems to suggest a lack of awareness that we now are a culture of pregnant persons, faced ire for excluding biological females who now identify as male.)
“It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me,” writes Keller in The Wall Street Journal.
For the crime of expressing out loud her pro-life views, Keller lost her job.
Sadly, the exclusion of pro-life women is apparently, even in our “enlightened” era, an acceptable form of discrimination.
Never mind that there’s always been a robust percentage of women who identify as pro-life (in fact, a third of American women say they are pro-life, according to a 2022 Gallup poll). Never mind that being the sex which experiences pregnancy is supposed to give your views on abortion more weight.
Keller’s experience highlights how insane certain settings can be for pro-life women.
After a series of speakers denounced the Dobbs decision in her law firm’s conference call, Keller writes, she chose to speak out.
“I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies,” she recalls in her article, published Nov. 29.
Then Keller, clearly no coward, dared to touch the third rail of woke politics: Discussing the clear racism of abortion.
“I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide,” she writes. “I said I thought this was tragic.”
Within hours, Hogan Lovells suspended and even attacked Keller.
In a statement to Above the Law, a law blog that covered the incident in July, Hogan Lovells wrote that an employee’s comments had been found by other employees to be “inappropriate and offensive.” Above the Law also published an internal email in which Hogan Lovells accused Keller of having made “anti-Black comments” and stated that “racist actions and statements are contrary to our culture.”
Ah, yes, the racism of wanting black babies to be born.
Keller, who headed the U.S. business restructuring and insolvency practice at Hogan Lovells, herself wrote that “The outrage was immediate” after she spoke on the call.
“The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they ‘lost their ability to breathe’ on hearing my comments,” Keller adds. “After more of the same, I hung up.”
Reached by email for comment and asked whether the firm wanted to confirm or deny Keller’s account in the Journal, Hogan Lovells spokesperson Ritchenya Dodd said, “We fully encourage our people to share their views on important issues that matter to them, but we expect our people to conduct themselves in accordance with firm policies. We value our differences, which make us stronger as a firm.”
Yes, clearly, the firm “value[s] our differences.”
Let’s take a moment to look at the facts about abortion and race. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, looking at 2019 abortion data, 38% of abortions were performed on black women. So nearly 4 out of 10 abortions are provided to black women, despite the fact that blacks make up about 14% of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.
I may not have read “How to Be an Antiracist,” but I’m pretty sure that these numbers suggest that abortion disproportionately affects the black community.
“What is racist is the fact that African Americans have the highest abortion rate,” said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in 2020.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, who had two abortions, now advocates pro-life policies.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was so racist that even that abortion giant has given up trying to defend her (after doing so as recently as 2016). Surely it’s not irrelevant that abortion’s most fervent champion in American history was a huge eugenics proponent?
But even if Keller hadn’t exposed the racism of abortion norms in America to her co-workers, it’s not clear she would have been OK.
In the era of cancel culture, as corporations continue to become woke, it’s anyone’s guess whether it’s safe to voice your views on abortion at the workplace, even if you do so politely and even if you’re in possession of a uterus.
A friend of mine, who works in a corporate setting, told me that on the day of the Dobbs decision, a female colleague said on a call that today was a dark day for all women—or something along those lines. My friend, despite being pro-life herself, didn’t feel comfortable saying anything beyond that different people had different views on the topic, and then changing the subject.
My friend is likely far from alone in self-censoring, especially at the workplace, given that few are easily able to handle being fired or facing other financial or reputational consequences.
To give an insight into the hostility some employees are facing, consider this Aug. 23 letter printed by “The Ethicist,” a column printed in The New York Times Magazine.
The ethical dilemma? Well, the letter writer is worried that her colleague and self-described friend of almost nine years is pro-life, but not public about it.
“Especially after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, though, I struggle with having a friend who supports what I think is a restriction of my rights to make my own choices about my body,” writes the advice seeker, adding:
“I struggle with the idea that she is able to protect herself from the fallout of people knowing she is anti-abortion when implementing her views would take away rights that many people see as vital to living a life with dignity.”
The horror.
Amazingly, it is The New York Times columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who ends up having the more “moderate” take, advising that “Your friend’s view on the topic [abortion] shouldn’t hurt her professionally.”
But the anonymous letter writer isn’t alone in her extremism. In July, shortly after the Dobbs decision, Jennifer Stavros opined in a Telegraph column that it was fine to not have pro-life friends: “We do not owe you friendship when you don’t believe that we deserve basic human rights.”
“Theologian, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and pro-choice advocate Desmond Tutu famously said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have sided with the oppressor,’” Stavros wrote.
What’s clear is that leftists are trying to set a new standard: Either be pro-abortion or face the kind of ostracization formerly reserved for racists, Nazis, and other oppressors. Don’t think you can hold down a professional job and still be pro-life. Don’t think you can have friends and still be pro-life. Don’t think that your gender gives you any more freedom to hold pro-life views and still be an accepted member of society.
That’s chilling. Robin Keller may be one of the first persons post-Dobbs to face professional consequences for her pro-life views, but if leftists have their way, she won’t be the last.
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Australia: The war against boys is having a damaging impact on the education gender gap
For more than three decades women have outnumbered men at Australian universities.
The education gender gap is widening, with boys trailing girls from primary school to university, but there appears to be little concern about correcting the imbalance.
If men were outnumbering women at university since the 1980s there would be an outcry but no one in authority seems terribly troubled by the fact that, according to University Admission Centre analysis this year, being male is “greater than any of the other recognised disadvantages we looked at”.
There are a multitude of programs to correct the gender disparity in the few areas where male students do better, such as engineering, to encourage greater female participation.
Some universities even lower entry requirements for girls to boost female representation but there are few, if any, schemes to address the education gap for male students.
For boys one of the biggest areas of concern is literacy, where by year 9 they trail girls by about 20 months, according to NAPLAN data — which also shows reading standard for this cohort fell to a record low, with 13.5 per cent of boys unable to read at the minimum standard.
Writing about the gender literacy gap, the Centre for Independent Studies’ Glenn Fahey warned that “boys in Australian schools are at a decisive educational disadvantage”.
Best-selling author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has long argued that the decline in men’s academic performance is bad not just for boys but for society.
He explains the situation in educational institutions is far worse than basic statistics indicate. “There are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men,” wrote Peterson, who says anti-male sentiment in academia is demoralising and demotivating young men.
Indeed the war against boys, and masculinity, is evident even in boys’ schools. Messages about “toxic masculinity” and “male privilege” are unrelenting, as they are in popular culture.
Can you imagine the outrage if the term “toxic femininity” was used to describe traits synonymous with womanhood?
We must stop treating young men like they’re born guilty or that their natural masculine instincts are detrimental to society.
We have a great deal more to fear from weak, inept men than strong, capable ones.
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15 December, 2022
My Day at Yale: A Great University Turns Human Trafficker
By NAOMI R. WOLF
On Dec 3, 2022, very early in the morning, I took a car from my cozy hotel in Boston, to the open commons in front of Yale’s Old Campus. I alit from the car in nearly freezing weather.
I mention the discomfort of the morning because it seemed to be emblematic of the icy shoulder which my alma mater presented to me.
I—we—were there to protest the “mandate” by the university of bivalent “boosters” into the bodies of the students; this was required of them before they could - and in order that they might—return to campus after Winter break.
Astonishingly, the faculty and staff—meaning, surely, the administrators too—were not thus “mandated.” (Harvard too has a similar “mandate” affecting students but not faculty).
We who were there to protest were outcasts, reprobates. Yet all we were doing there was pleading for the safety of the young men and women in the campus just beyond us.
There were about three dozen people at the rally and then at the march; a small, committed, straggling group. Parents of the university students were absent; students themselves were glaringly absent; administrators, faculty—appeared to be entirely absent. A few dedicated health freedom activists, organized by TeamRealityCT, and the speakers ourselves—stood vulnerably in a corner of the commons, shouting terrifying facts and urgent warnings into a crackly mic, into a heedless wind, expecting to be arrested.
I was now there to try to stop a barbarous betrayal of the student body, by the very institution that claimed to speak up on behalf of civilization itself. How ironic that I was here to try to stop a crude act of foolishness, and of illogic and of sheer stupidity.
I was at the rally because I’d been informed by activist Joni McGary—not by the university’s communications with its alumni, not by CNN or by The New York Times—that Yale was, incredibly, “mandating” the “bivalent booster”—the one tested on eight mice—on its entire student population.
This demand was in spite of their having been twice mRNA vaccinated. It was in spite of their having been already “boosted.” It was in spite of any prior COVID-19 infection, or despite religious objections, physical problems, fears or resistance.
My soul revolted.
I stood in the bitter cold on a low makeshift wooden dais, speaking without notes, issuing what became a roar from the depth of a mother’s heart, my own heart, about the danger to the young adults in the institution behind me, that was being posed by—by the very institution itself.
In my speech, I explained that the 55,000 Pfizer documents, released via a lawsuit by Aaron Siri and his firm, have been reviewed by our volunteer group of 3500 medical and scientific experts; that they have written, under the leadership of DailyClout COO Amy Kelly, 48 reports. These experts have proven that 77% of the adverse events in the Pfizer documents are sustained by women, and that of those, 16% are, in Pfizer’s own words, “reproductive disorders.”
In the Pfizer documents there are, as I cried out in my speech, 20 different names for ruining the menstrual cycles of women. You can bleed all month; or have two periods a month; or hemorrhage viciously; or have agonizing cramps. How could young women compete in scholarly terms, how could they be athletes, I asked, in the face of this certain suffering? And how was this knowing infliction of menstrual damage not discriminatory against women—and not thus a violation of Title 9, which requires an equitable learning environment?
The Pfizer documents also confirm, I shouted to the crowd, as Dr Chris Flowers has abundantly proven, that both Pfizer and the FDA knew four months before there was any public announcement, that the mRNA vaccine had caused myocarditis in 35 teenagers and young adults. I warned the university that to force the students to submit to this injection would for certain cause infertility and/or horrific menstrual suffering in some of the young women, and that it would for sure cause heart damage in some of the young men.
I made the case, based on both Federal and Connecticut state law, that this situation constituted human trafficking.
I joined our sad little troop of moms and dads and activists, after my speech was done. A young reporter from the Yale Daily News interviewed me; her face looked frozen, her eyes almost glazed, as she tried with pre-set questions to push me to define the activists at the rally as being politically motivated—i.e., right wing.
I told her that I had no idea how they voted. I felt sad that her editor had evidently insisted on her trying to get this nonsensical angle, prior to her even arriving at the demonstration.
I saw on her face the tension of a very young, very smart woman, who had just heard credible statements about damage to young women like her, and yet who was trying hard to do her job; but it was a job corrupted by a corrupted “news” organization.
The article was predictably defamatory (I’m not a “vaccine skeptic”, etc etc) with an “expert,” Dr. Hugh Taylor, trotted out to flat-out lie to students and faculty with the claim that there “has been no research” tying reproductive harm to the mRNA vaccines. This, even as I’d just presented the evidence—and even as the evidence elsewhere is also terrifyingly mounting.
I tried later to contact the Yale Daily News for a retraction of the many falsehoods in their piece—but that incubator of journalism was no longer operating as the press is supposed to do in an open society. You could not call the editor. You could not even leave a message: the phone number connected weirdly to an internal phone message system that could take no messages. I felt so sad that young journalists were now being trained via a publication that was more like Pravda than like the Yale Daily News of the open-society past.
More here:
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14367&omhide=true&trk=titleVirginia
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California Students Lost 5 Months Progress in Math Over Pandemic: Study
California students lost nearly half a year’s worth of math progress from 2019 to 2022, according to a recent study measuring pandemic learning loss by researchers at Stanford and Harvard universities.
The “Education Recovery Scorecard” study, published in October, compared pre-pandemic academic progress to that made over the pandemic.
The study found that California students lost an average of almost five months of progress in math, and one month in reading over the past three years.
The data also shows urban districts suffered more math loss than rural, suburban, or town districts.
California’s two largest districts—Los Angeles Unified and San Diego Unified—mirrored the state’s numbers in math.
However, in reading, both districts fared slightly better than the state average, though both still reported some loss.
Despite that, Los Angeles’ numbers show a smaller decline overall than its 2019 numbers, scoring slightly better than in 2018.
Meanwhile in Orange County, districts that usually make progress lost some ground in math.
Capistrano, Irvine, Placencia-Yorba Linda, Newport-Mesa, and Orange unified school districts, along with Fullerton Elementary lost between two and three months’ worth of math learning over the pandemic. All districts previously made some sort of progress in math pre-pandemic, according to the report.
Orange Unified, Santa Ana Unified, and Anaheim Elementary lost nearly five to six months of math progress.
But several Orange County school districts made small gains in reading—Fountain Valley, Capistrano, and Irvine unified school districts, and Fullerton and Cypress elementary schools.
Orange Unified and Placencia-Yorba Linda Unified maintained their reading scores from 2019, while Newport-Mesa Unified and Anaheim Elementary lost about a month’s worth of reading progress.
Thomas Kane, a Harvard professor and author of the study, said the report is intended to help districts understand where they need to improve.
“Our hope is that policymakers and educators can use these detailed data to better target education recovery efforts toward the communities, schools, and students who were most harmed by the pandemic,” Kane said in the report.
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Teachers don’t always follow evidence on what works, research finds
Australian students are being held back by poor teaching practices and lack of direction in the classroom, researchers say.
A major survey of teaching practices by the government-funded Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) found that managing disruptive behaviour was also a major downfall in Australian teachers’ adoption of the best evidence on teaching practice.
Schools were overly reliant on suspension and expulsion, rather than working towards creating focused classrooms and respectful students, the survey found.
Most Australian teachers did use evidence of what works to inform their teaching practice, but many factors – including a lack of time and confidence – often prevented them from adopting the most effective practice to help students learn, AERO found.
Maximising the use of evidence-based teaching practices was critical to turning around stagnant and declining outcomes in Australian schools, as evidenced by NAPLAN and PISA results, the report argued.
More than 930 teachers and school leaders were surveyed about their teaching practice.
Head of research and evaluation at AERO, Dr Zid Mancenido, said the study provided important insights into the classroom practices of Australian teachers.
“For the first time we can see what is working well and what needs to change about how evidence is being used in Australian schools,” Mancenido said.
He said he hoped the research would drive support for more teachers to effectively use evidence and reverse Australia’s recent declines in student achievement.
“The findings show promise but need to go much further if we are to lift educational outcomes for all students.”
The survey found that 64 per cent of teachers have regular access to instructional coaching on using evidence to improve their teaching, and 73 per cent work at schools that set aside regular times to discuss evidence that could improve their teaching practice.
But it also found that 36 per cent allow unguided instruction or independent inquiry time for students to discover answers for themselves, and 71 per cent design lessons that match the different learning styles of their students.
“These practices are not supported by evidence,” the report found.
The report also surveyed teachers on their classroom management practices, and found that just 61 per cent of teachers frequently tell students to follow classroom rules.
It cited research from the OECD’s latest Teaching and Learning International Survey (2018), which showed that a quarter of Australian teachers need to wait a long time for students to quieten down so that teaching can begin, and a third lose a lot of time because of students interrupting the lesson.
Adam Voigt, chief executive of consultancy Real Schools, said many teachers felt pressured to deliver the content of a large curriculum at the expense of focusing on what students are actually gaining from the lesson.
“There is the kind of pressure that teaching has become a job where what you are trying to do is get through the curriculum so that you can tick off ‘Yes, I taught this’, but it actually isn’t something that engaged the students and got them activated,” Voigt said.
Many teachers, particularly early career teachers, are looking for robust guidance on how to manage disruptive behaviour, something they are inadequately prepared for in initial teacher education.
“We’ve still got a lot of focus in our pre-service teacher training on the what of teaching, but not the how,” Voigt said.
Dr Jordana Hunter, Grattan Institute program director for education, said keeping up-to-date with research evidence is a big challenge for time-poor teachers: “There needs to be more opportunities for expert teachers, with strong mastery of the research evidence in their subject area, to work with other teachers in their school.”
Hunter said it was disappointing that less than half of surveyed teachers said they would encourage a colleague to stop using a teaching practice that isn’t supported by good evidence.
“Every student deserves best-practice teaching,” she said.
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14 December, 2022
Mother who pulled kids from public school over woke curriculum says home-schooling produces 'amazing' results
A Texas mother of four shared her experience home-schooling three of her kids for the first time and the huge academic advancements they made in reading.
A Texas mom saw significant advancements in her children's reading levels after she switched them to home education over what she considered a woke curriculum being taught in the public school.
"They have done really well," a mother of four, Tara Carter, told Fox News. "The advances in reading have been amazing."
Average math scores saw the largest declines ever across every state, dropping five points for fourth graders and eight points for eighth graders from 2019 to 2022, according to the Nation's Report Card. Reading scores dropped to levels not seen since 1992, decreasing three points for both grades in two years and revealing significant proficiency setbacks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Carter's children have instead shown improvement this school year.
The twins "are reading way above their grade level," she said after a few months of home-schooling. "They're actually moving through it so fast that they're going to complete it before the end of the grade year, and they'll actually move up to the next level."
Carter pulled three of her kids – a kindergartner and twin first-graders – from public to home-school this year but allowed her ninth-grade daughter to attend high school with her friends. Her decision to switch to home-schooling derived from disagreements with the curriculum focusing on topics such as gender identity and sexual orientation rather than core subjects like math and language arts, Carter previously told Fox News.
Carter told Fox News her ability to give her kid's one-on-one instruction and move at their own pace helped their academic progress.
In public school classrooms, "there's so many children that they don't really get a whole lot of individual praise," Carter said. "I'm able to give that because I'm focused one child at a time."
Texas students pulled from public schools for home-schooling increased by 40% in spring 2021 compared to the previous year, according to the Texas Education Agency. Many families shifted to home education during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Carter previously told Fox News she believes some parents kept their kids at home to avoid classroom politicization and bias.
"I do not miss the school setting at all," Carter told Fox News. She said at-home learning helped their social-well being.
"I think it's so much better for the children," Carter continued. "Schools, I think, can really mess with children's mental health, between bullying and feeling like they're falling behind."
Based on the success of their first semester, Carter said she would continue to home-school her kids and recommended other parents consider the alternative.
"I've loved it and the kids have loved it," Carter told Fox News. "You do not have to be a genius or have a teaching degree to teach your kids."
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Virginia After School Satan club on hold for now
Over 60 Chesapeake, Virginia, community members gave their opinions on a proposed "Satan Club" during a school board meeting on Monday, while board members held off on voting on its approval, according to reports.
WAVY-TV reported that an application submitted to B.M. Williams Primary School last month was canceled last week after the club’s sponsor stepped down.
Lucien Greaves, is spokesman for The Satanic Temple, a group of political activists who identify themselves as a religious sect, are seeking to establish After-School Satan clubs as a counterpart to fundamentalist Christian Good News Clubs, which they see as the Religious Right to infiltrate public education, and erode the separation of church and state.
Lucien Greaves, is spokesman for The Satanic Temple, a group of political activists who identify themselves as a religious sect, are seeking to establish After-School Satan clubs as a counterpart to fundamentalist Christian Good News Clubs, which they see as the Religious Right to infiltrate public education, and erode the separation of church and state. (Photo by Josh Reynolds for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The paperwork has been resubmitted by a new sponsor, though it is not clear whether the club is expected to start on Dec. 15 as originally intended.
June Everett, an ordained minister in The Satanic Temple is the campaign director for After School Satan Club, or ASSC.
The club is intended to foster creativity and promote empathy, according to Everett, and attempts to establish a constructive and positive alternative to other religious after school clubs.
Everett told Fox News Digital that she was first led to The Satanic Temple five years ago after her first-grader "was traumatized by his classmates on the playground one day, and they were attendees of the Good News Club that was taking place at the public elementary school he was attending at the time."
After picking her crying son up from school one day, he said other students told him if he did not accept Jesus Christ into his heart and start going to church, he was going to burn in hell.
This led Everett to seek alternatives to what was being offered to students.
On Monday, school board members did not vote on whether to allow the club, WAVY reported, but wanted to hear about the safety and concerns surrounding it.
A flyer on The Satanic Temple’s Facebook Page read, "The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religion that views Satan as a literary figure who represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit.
After School Satan Club does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology. Instead, the Satanic Temple supports children to think for themselves."
Despite concerns from parents in the district who argue the club does not need to be in the elementary school where children are so young, lawyers said the school must make room for the club because of its affiliation with religion, tying it back to the First Amendment and freedom of speech.
Still, all students are required to have a parent-signed permissions slip to attend any after school program hosted by an outside organization
https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-school-satan-club-on-hold-now
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Australia: Time to end the arms race of early university offers
Australian universities have been major contributors to Australia’s human and social capital. The success and reach of their civic mission over the past 40 years are largely due to a highly effective response to three challenges of universal education: access, equity and excellence.
Some 1980s policy genius in the form of income-contingent loans for tuition costs (HECS) largely solved the issue of access by lowering barriers to entry. The related challenges of equity and excellence have been met with a history of university admission based on public examinations, common across all schools (the HSC) and recently coupled with school-based assessments, which are moderated to support fairness across the cohort.
This approach formed the basis for a predictable and transparent pathway to university for school leavers seeking that option. Evolved versions of HECS and the HSC are still with us, however, there is a major disruption afoot with the growing prevalence of early entry offers. Already, the signs are concerning.
This week, both the Higher School Certificate and ATAR scores (a creature of the university sector informed by HSC outcomes) will be released. They will be accompanied by an explosion in the number of early-entry offers to university for school leavers; thousands of these offers were issued months ago.
The consequences and scale of this unregulated practice are not well understood. There is no obligation on the universities to release early offer figures, indeed, many refuse such requests from the media.
Nearly 25,000 students have applied for early offers through the state’s admissions centre (UAC), and others applied directly to individual universities, meaning more than half of the school-leaver cohort could have an early offer of some form.
Post-COVID financial pressures are driving the university sector to increase enrolments and, in the competition to attract students, early offers have transformed from a “first mover” advantage into an arms race. While universities claim these schemes are “holistic” and reduce “exam stress”, the significant financial interest behind them is undeniable.
There might be some benefits to the early offer regime, but they appear to be tilted in favour of universities, they get the planning and operational certainty and income projection. The upside for the students is less clear, particularly in the case of unconditional or low-stake offers, which can come as early as April of year 12.
There are increasing reports that many students with early offers “check out” of their studies, lose motivation, or do not fully invest in final exams. This is not a helpful dynamic for either them or their peers without early offers, who need to remain fully applied. More broadly, has the question been asked: why condition students to a consequence-free examination season or assessment or desensitise them from the rigours of the learning experience?
Defenders of the open slather approach to early offers are often the harshest critics of ATAR, who cite wellbeing concerns to push back against assessments. Some early-offer programs ignore the ATAR entirely.
The early-offer university students will inevitably collide with reality and learn assessments and exams do matter and maybe their HSC-lite experience hasn’t really prepared them for the next step-up. Wait, what? I’m not getting an unconditional, early offer of graduation for my BA?
The critics of ATAR ignore the fact that it remains the most reliable available predictor of university performance. We know that the vast majority of school leavers still use ATAR in their university admissions and that ATAR remains a significant predictor of grades and completion rates.
Obviously, ATAR is an imperfect measure on its own, but there are already adjustment factors (formerly known as bonus points) as well as a host of scholarships (rural, ATSI, dux, financial hardship, etc.) designed to address its limitations.
The explosion in early offers has occurred without a clear rationale in support of students. To its credit, the NSW government has commissioned a review of early offers, with new guidelines being developed. Here are some suggestions. One, early offers should be required to be conditional; a minimum academic requirement is perfectly reasonable. Two, there should be a limit to just how early these early offers can be made (say, September). Three, early offers should be managed centrally through UAC rather than directly with individual universities, thereby allowing regulators to monitor the effects of the various schemes.
The HSC is a world-class credential designed for students pursuing university and vocational and employment pathways alike. Vice-chancellors should respect its role and, more broadly, the symbiotic relationship between schools and universities. All early offers might have a place but, in the meantime, we need to insist on more transparency and standardisation.
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13 December, 2022
Pennsylvania school board member to resign over statement rejecting 'cis White male' for president
A Pennsylvania school board member who refused to vote for "the only cis White male" on the board to serve as president has decided to resign from her position at the start of 2023.
Upper Moreland School District board member Jennifer Solot made the comments during an open school board meeting on Dec. 6, just before a vote was held to appoint a new board president.
Solot led the motions as acting president during the board’s reorganization meeting. Two names were up for the seat of president: April Stainback and Greg D’Elia.
"I believe that Mr. D’Elia would make an excellent president," she said. "However, I feel that electing the only cis White male on this board, president of this district, sends the wrong message to our community: a message that is contrary to what we as a board have been trying to accomplish."
A cisgender person is one who identifies as the gender they were born.
On Monday, Upper Moreland School District Superintendent Dr. Susan Elliott issued a statement on Solot’s comments.
"As a result of this incident, Ms. Solot has decided to resign from the board effective January 2, 2023," Elliott said. "She wishes to apologize for her poorly chosen words and does not want to be a distraction from the great things happening in our schools on a daily basis. The district thanks Ms. Solot for her five years of service to the Upper Moreland community as a board member."
The superintendent added that Solot’s comments were "solely hers" and did not represent the opinions of the rest of the school board members or the district.
Neither Solot nor D’Elia responded to requests for comment on the matter, but the latter was included in Elliott’s statement.
"Indeed, Board Director Greg D’Elia, who was the subject of her comments, says that he ‘supports diversity, but these comments did not further diversity and reflected poorly on our community,’" Elliott said.
According to Elliott, the district focuses on nondiscrimination across the schools and inside the classrooms. It also sees value in the diversity of the community it serves and helps students and staff achieve success without discrimination based on race, color, age, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, ancestry, gender identity, and more.
She also said the district hires "the most qualified person for the position" and does not discriminate.
In an 8-1 vote, D’Elia was not elected to the seat of president by the other board members on Dec. 6, but Solot was the only member to voice concerns about electing him because of his race and gender identity.
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Michael Gove slams the New York Times over report on 'Trojan Horse' schools scandal
Michael Gove has accused The New York Times of helping to ‘undermine the truth’ about the Trojan Horse schools scandal.
The Cabinet minister said the Left-leaning US news organisation had taken a ‘peculiar stance’ towards Britain in recent years, portraying it ‘as an insular backwater whose inhabitants are drowning in a tide of nostalgia, racism and bad food’.
He said a podcast series from The New York Times and Serial, which examined the 2014 scandal at schools in Birmingham, fed accusations of Islamophobia and was ‘replete with errors and omissions’.
His comments come after a report, released today, examined recent coverage of the Trojan Horse affair following claims by activists and some protagonists that there was a government-driven Islamophobic ‘witch-hunt’.
In the foreword to the report by the Policy Exchange think-tank, Mr Gove and Nick Timothy, who was an adviser to then-home secretary Theresa May, allege a ‘concerted effort to muddy the waters’ and slam ‘useful idiots in publications like The New York Times’.
They said: ‘The notion that the events in Birmingham had nothing to do with extremism is as dangerous as it is false, since it conceals an ugly truth... we have a problem in Britain with Islamist ideology and its adherents, who seek to impose their intolerant values on Muslim communities, including children, through non-violent means including the capture of important institutions such as schools.
‘The fear of being branded “Islamophobic” has only made it more difficult to speak up about such extremism.’
The Trojan Horse scandal saw Islamic hardliners try to impose their agenda on state schools. It led to five schools being placed into special measures and teachers banned. It was sparked by an anonymous letter to Birmingham council outlining a conspiracy to take over schools and run them on strict Islamic lines. The letter was quickly dismissed as bogus, but some of its claims turned out to be genuine.
The New York Times series attempted to prove the subsequent furore was based in Islamophobia. Mr Gove, who was education secretary at the time, said the podcasts gave those attempting to rewrite the history ‘fresh wind’.
A New York Times spokesman said: ‘We’re proud of our coverage of the UK, including “The Trojan Horse Affair”, which... underwent extensive fact-checking.’ He added that New York Times did not believe the Policy Exchange report ‘was undertaken in good faith’.
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University Leftism is now hugely influential in Australia
I was recently pleased to hear Senator Alex Antic decrying the state of education in our schools, citing in his speech several horror stories from parents. The examples are endless, but what we may resolve with total assurance is this: radical ideologies have hijacked our schools, and our children’s futures are in grave peril – or so say conservative politicians.
Every radicalised school teacher, in addition to all those involved in administrating a school or implementing a primary or secondary curriculum, holds some kind of tertiary teaching degree – so where do you think their radicalism was sown and cemented?
It is not the schools but the universities that are responsible for the destructive political and socio-cultural crisis that plagues Australia today.
Everyone is going to university. At the end of 2021, a record 50.2 per cent of Australians aged between 15 and 74 held bachelor’s degrees. That is approximately a 500 per cent increase over the last twenty years. Moreover, 62 per cent of school-leavers intended to commence at university in 2021, whereas approximately only one-tenth were committed towards TAFE or college studies.
Therefore, if it is not already the case, we may conclude that it will not be long before the majority of eligible Australian voters hold a tertiary qualification.
Of course, this would be wholly inconsequential if universities were simply striving to teach and advance knowledge. But what was once the proud objective of the 11th century Bolognese, or the 12th century Oxonians, or the 13th century Parisians, is no longer the case. The overpowering priority in Australian universities seems to be this: disseminate radical sociological ideologies underpinned by, amongst other things, pseudo-morality, irresponsibility, hedonism, and victimhood as quickly as possible.
I could cite example after example until I turned blue in the face to justify this assertion; instead, it might be more revealing if we all simply seek out a relative or a friend and ask them for their worst university horror story. Because if ‘lived experiences’ are considered to be appropriate source material by today’s academic standards, then perhaps I should introduce into my argument that I am a recent graduate of several schools within the Arts faculty.
Nowhere is today’s radicalism more pervasive than in the Arts. Regrettably, this is another point that is often overlooked. The Arts are largely ignored by the political class – Tony Burke, who I must say went to this year’s federal election promising artists Nirvana Down Under, has even now begun to disappoint – when in fact it is the Arts that hold an incalculable influence over society. This is both a beautiful and terrifying reality. It is the Arts that brought us, for instance, Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird, but also Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto. More recently, whilst we might say that engineers did not conceptualise Black Lives Matter to the extent that Arts faculties did, they wasted no time in subscribing to the movement’s doctrine.
I clearly recall one of my undergraduate classes, which purported to concern English grammar. In this class, I was encouraged to submit my preferred pronouns, asked to cultivate a safe learning environment for my peers, asked whether I required any trigger warnings, permitted to allocate 10 per cent of my grade myself so long as I was honest, and assured that if my mental health were impaired one week I could consider some of the course’s assessment items as optional. When we finally did come to discussing semantics, one of the very first things the class was taught was that English grammar arose to separate the rich from the poor.
Thus, here are three summarised propositions I offer to readers:
* More than half the country, virtually, holds a university degree.
* Universities at large are teaching radical sociological ideologies.
* Tertiary graduates (particularly graduates of Arts faculties) more often than not hold the greatest influence over society, determining its popular trends.
In these propositions, I think, there lies a recipe for total political domination. And that’s why I’m worried. Because, just as Labor has institutionalised the unions, the Greens have taken for themselves the universities.
Radical ideologies and the Australian Greens go hand in hand. Here are just a few positions they took to the federal election:
Ban the construction of new coal, oil and gas infrastructure.
Ban all political donations from the mining and resources sector and ‘other dirty industries’.
Unpack ‘white privilege’ and ‘white fragility’.
$1.07 billion to build First Nations owned healing places.
Amend section 44 of the Constitution so that dual citizens can run for Federal office.
End offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru.
Reduce military spending to 1.5 per cent of GDP.
Introduce legislation that prohibits Australia exporting weapons.
Increase Australia’s humanitarian intake to 50,000 per year.
Appoint a Minister for Equality and an LGBTQ+ Human Rights Commissioner.
$15 million to facilitate transgender ‘surgical procedures’.
20 per cent of the Australian Public Service to be disabled by 2030, via quotas.
Cut $61 million for school chaplains (to ‘make schools safer’).
More importantly, though, these are, to me, the Greens’ most striking promises, and funnily enough they all have to do with education:
$19 billion for free childcare.
$49 billion for fully-free public schools.
$477 million to end rape culture in public schools.
Abolish student debt.
Lifelong free education for all.
Guarantee every student a liveable income.
10 per cent increase in university funding.
The Greens’ disproportionate prioritisation of the education sector, particularly the tertiary education sector, seems telling.
Moreover, in analysing the three Queensland seats that fell to the Greens – Brisbane, Ryan and Griffith – in accordance with 2021 Census data and themes previously discussed, we cement our argument further in fact.
Of the thirty Commonwealth divisions in Queensland, Brisbane, Ryan, and Griffith all have the highest populations of tertiary students. Brisbane leads the charge with 25,030 tertiary students. Griffith comes with 22,830 tertiary students and Ryan with 21,403 students. In comparison, the Queensland division with the smallest number of tertiary enrolees is Maranoa – but that’s still 5,302 students. Interestingly, Maranoa is the safest Liberal-National federal seat in Queensland.
Interestingly again, the five Queensland divisions with the smallest populations of tertiary students – Maranoa, Wide Bay (5,175), Kennedy (5,302), Flynn (5,456) and Hinkler (5,504), all saw first-preference swings to their respective Greens candidate between 1 per cent and 2 per cent; the exception is Wide Bay, which actually saw a first-preference swing against the Greens in the order of 0.5 per cent.
So, does correlation equal causation, or am I grasping at straws?
Of course, there is no way to be certain – but we’d be fools not to heed the warning laid bare before us. Australian politics is no longer organised within the framework of a two-party system, but rather a two-and-a-half-party system. The Greens function as a major political organisation, with the funds, media, manpower, and now universities as institutions to match. But they also masquerade as an insignificant, disorganised minor party that serves no other purpose than to facilitate protest votes or proxy votes for Labor. In the case of the latter, the Victorian state election in key seats like Glen Waverly and Ashwood demonstrates as much.
By my estimates, Labor’s short-term solution is to embrace a long-term catastrophe. Because the Victorian state election also shines a light on the former Labor seat of Richmond, a seat in which Labor’s first-preference vote decreased sharply by 11.6 per cent, and a seat that is now condemned to four years under the Green yoke.
If I could make two recommendations to my native Liberal Party, they would be this:
Look to the future of our country, and in so doing regard the Greens as the true Enemy. Labor is now the sparring partner.
Lay the groundwork to launch some sort of large-scale public inquiry, be it a Royal Commission or otherwise, into the ideological and commercial abuses of Australia’s tertiary institutions. Expose what goes on behind the closed doors of not all but so many lecture theatres..
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/universities-are-the-new-green-unions/
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12 December, 2022
Elite Chicago Private School’s Dean of Students Brags About Bringing in LGBTQ+ Health Center to Teach ‘Queer Sex’ to Minors
Project Veritas released a new video today exposing a high-ranking private school official, Joseph Bruno, who admitted that he teaches underage children about sex with items such as “butt-plugs” and “dildos.”
Bruno, who works as the Dean of Students at an elite school in Chicago called Francis W. Parker, said that these were the items brought into the classroom by an LGBTQ+ group.
“So, I’ve been the Dean for four years. During Pride -- we do a Pride Week every year -- I had our LGBTQ+ Health Center come in [to the classroom]. They were passing around butt-plugs and dildos to my students -- talking about queer sex, using lube versus using spit,” Bruno said.
The school administrator claimed that this educational practice is one of the reasons he enjoys his current employment.
“The kids are just playing with ‘em, looking at ‘em [butt-plugs and dildos] … They're like, ‘How does this butt-plug work? How do we do – like, how does this work?’ That's a really cool part of my job,” he said.
Bruno also said he has invited a Drag Queen to the school. “We had a Drag Queen come in -- pass out cookies and brownies and do photos.”
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Pennsylvania school board member denied vote for being only cis white man on board
An Upper Moreland School Board member said she would not vote for the only white cis man on the board for the role of president because it sends the wrong message to the community.
A Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, school board member said she would not vote for "the only cis White male" on the board to serve as president, despite prefacing the comment that he would make an excellent president.
Upper Moreland School District, which is in the northern suburbs of Philadelphia, held its most recent school board meeting on Dec. 6.
During the meeting, School Board Treasurer Jennifer Solot led the motions as acting president until a new president was elected.
Two names were considered for the top leadership position: April Stainback and Greg D’Elia.
Just before the vote, Solot weighed in on who she would be voting for.
"I believe that Mr. D’Elia would make an excellent president," she said. "However, I feel that electing the only cis white male on this board president of this district sends the wrong message to our community: a message that is contrary to what we as a board have been trying to accomplish."
With the influx of gender types, cisgender refers to those who identify with the gender they are given at birth.
Based on Solot’s statements, D’Elia was born a male and identifies as a male.
Solot went on to say she thinks it is important to practice what they as a school board preaches and recognize that their words have strength, whether spoken on sidewalks in the communities they serve or from behind the tables they sit at during the meetings.
"Mrs. Stainback has done an exemplary job as president these last few months, and the strength of her performance has earned her my vote tonight," Solot added.
When it came to a vote, eight members voted for Stainback while D’Elia was the lone vote for himself.
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French dance teacher ousted from elite university after given ultimatum on using ‘men-women’ terminology
A ballroom dance teacher at elite French university Sciences Po Paris is out of a job after she was reprimanded for insisting on calling dance students "men" and "women," as opposed to using non-gendered language.
"I say women on one side and men on the other because in dance there is a role for the man and a role for the woman," former Sciences Po teacher Valerie, told AFP. She asked the outlet to only identify her by her first name.
"That's the reason that we separated," she said.
The university told AFP that officials had called a meeting with Valerie over her use of "discriminatory" language. Valerie subsequently quit her job over the university’s demands to use the words "leader" and "follower" instead of "men" and "women," according to the outlet.
A student who spoke to a Parisian outlet described Valerie as ""old school" who had made the class "feel uneasy."
After complaints that the school was going "woke," university officials doubled down on their support of having an inclusive environment.
"We received a complaint from a student ... backed up by several of them, according to which this teacher made remarks during her class that were discriminatory in nature in terms of the role of men in dance," a spokesperson for Sciences Po told AFP.
"We asked her to desist from doing so and she did not wish to and decided not to continue with her classes."
Sciences Po told Fox News Digital Sunday morning that the school "warned her about the requirement to stop her discriminatory comments, in accordance with the French legislation and our internal code of ethics."
"In light of this, and contrary to press allegations that she had been dismissed from Sciences Po, this teacher has informed our administration that she does not have further interest in pursuing her class at Sciences Po," the statement continued.
Valerie said she refused to "bow down to the dictatorship."
"They're censoring me. I won't bow down to the dictatorship. Forget about being politically correct. What's next? Swan Lake with a hairy swan?"
The teacher argued that" there was a notion of seduction" between a couple ballroom dancing, and added, "honestly two women dancing together, I find it ugly."
Sciences Po added in its statement to Fox News Digital that it is "committed to fighting against all forms of discrimination and hence firmly denounces the falsehoods and political manipulation engendered by the resignation of a dance teacher."
Valerie specialized in tango, waltz, salsa and other ballroom styles for the school extracurricular program, The Sunday Times reported.
Sciences Po is a public research university that opened in 1872 and has a reputation as being elite due to its difficult admission process.
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11 December, 2022
Are Liberal Education Policies Undermining Minorities They’re Intended To Help?
Howard Husock
Almost 40 years ago, I produced a public television film entitled “America’s First School,” which told the story, through alumni interviews, of the Boston Latin School, the nation’s oldest public high school.
It had evolved to become an elite entrance exam-based high school like New York’s Stuyvesant or San Francisco’s Lowell. It’s caught up today in the same controversy dogging all such schools, the “under-representation” of African-Americans.
It comes to mind on the occasion of the appointment of the former Obama administration secretary of education, John King, as chancellor of the 62-campus system of the State University of New York.
Mr. King has long focused on the so-called achievement gap for African-American students and chose to emphasize it again on the occasion of his appointment. One interviewee in my film did so, as well — but in a way that would now be considered unfashionable, to say the least, and at odds with Mr. King’s views on the underlying problem in a way that merits reflection.
It should first be said that the King choice is basically a good one. His background includes founding a successful Boston charter school and leading the charter school network Uncommon Schools.
“I have a long history of supporting good charter schools and not supporting bad charter schools,” Mr. King said. That’s as strong an endorsement of the concept by a public official one is likely to hear.
As New York State’s education commissioner, Mr. King ran afoul of teachers unions for his support of the so-called common core curriculum for public schools, the abortive Obama-backed effort to install more demanding subject matter and related student and teacher testing at the K-12 level. Whatever the merits of that controversial plan, Mr. King made the right enemies — and was willing to do so.
As SUNY chancellor he’ll be in a position to help choose new state-authorized charter school operators — and, one can hope, push the idea of lifting New York city’s current charter school cap. Many have been the very schools which have narrowed or even eliminated the learning gap between the races.
Mr. King, though, has frequently offered an analysis of the situation of Black students that merits reflection. In a speech at Georgetown University, he observed that “for students of color, disparities in educational opportunity and achievement are inextricably linked to our nation’s continued struggle to grapple with issues of race and bias.”
Mr. King added that it was America’s “legacy of slavery and the imposition of segregation that first made the education of black people a punishable offense and then established a separate, inferior system of schools for black children.”
There is no doubt about the history Mr. King cites and its lingering ill effects. Nonetheless, as experienced and sophisticated an educator as Mr. King surely knows there is more to the story, including the teachers unions with whom he’s tangled.
To those complications one hopes that he might add the legacy not just of racism but of the effort to undo it known as affirmative action. In my film, a Black Latin School alumnus, who had gone on to a successful journalism career, tells the story of a teacher who, concerned that his student was not achieving his potential, takes him aside.
“Don’t you know you have to be twice as good,” the teacher tells him. It is shocking to hear and says much about the racial atmosphere of early 1960s Boston. Nonetheless, the alum confides that he’d been both angered by the comment — and motivated by it.
The alumnus’ response suggests that there is more to the gap that so rightly concerns Mr. King than the Jim Crow past. It is the question of whether proposals such as that floated to drop the entrance exam for New York’s examination-based high schools or race-conscious college admission policies generally might be sending a message that perpetuates the achievement gap rather than helping to correct it.
Severing the connection between effort and achievement risks discouraging both. One struggles to understand the racial achievement gap otherwise in cities such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, where, the Washington Post reports, the gap persists even in an upper-middle-class community.
As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on whether affirmative action in elite university admissions has harmed Asians, it is time to consider whether it has undermined those it was intended to help. On this question, Mr. King, himself a Harvard College graduate, will be in a position to influence state policies and guide public opinion.
https://www.nysun.com/article/are-liberal-education-policies-undermining-minorities-theyre-intended-to-help ?
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50 shell-shocked teachers, staff flee chaotic Florida school district
Violent and disrespectful classroom behavior has led to a staggering 50 teachers and bus drivers to quit a Florida school district in the last two years.
Brevard County School District, the state’s 10th-largest, held a heated meeting Thursday that offered an unvarnished and often disturbing glimpse into the state of its classrooms.
“On an everyday basis I am deflecting being attacked, scratched, headbutted, pushed, hit,” teacher Alicia Kelderhouse said as her voice choked with emotion. “I’ve had my hair pulled, and pulled down to the ground. I’ve had my throat gone for on multiple occasions. It’s on an everyday basis right now.”
Kelderhouse said staffers often commiserate in the morning to muster the courage to face the day — and that frightened kids are grappling with the same fears.
“I have students who are afraid every day in the classroom,” she said. “It’s just not fair to them. That’s what hurts my heart the most.”
The head of the district’s beleaguered teachers union, Anthony Collucci, recounted recent incidents reported by staffers to school administrators.
One student began masturbating inside a classroom, an act that was recorded by a classmate and posted to a group chat.
Another teacher was hit in the face with a tape dispenser, while a colleague suffered a bite mark the “size of an orange” after a student munched on her arm.
Another educator frequently had to remove all furniture from her class because kids were routinely chucking it around the room or at each other.
One district teacher said behaviors have markedly worsened since the pandemic — but the classroom behavior was already plunging before COVID-19.
“The pandemic was an accelerant to a fire that was already raging,” he said.
The same staffer asserted that sexual misconduct, drug use, theft, violence, targeted spitting and property destruction had become the demoralizing hallmarks of his profession.
Several speakers pointed to the ubiquity of cellphones as a driver of classroom disorder, casting many students as screen addicts no longer capable of sustained attention.
Asserting that a culture of “unbelievable disrespect” has taken hold, one teacher said her kids look at their devices “hundreds” of times each day and keep their earbuds in while lessons are in progress.
“Our students cannot look away from their phones,” she said. “They cannot stop texting.”
Students often tell teachers that they have to wrap up a text message before they acknowledge being called on or addressed in class.
Educators routinely ask colleagues to watch their classrooms for a few moments so they can have a “mini-breakdown” inside a school bathroom, a speaker noted.
Veteran teacher Gene Trent said his colleagues used to call a student’s parent or guardian to address problems — but those efforts have been largely abandoned due to futility.
Trent said previously, a parent would thank a teacher for reaching out and promise to address the situation at home. But in recent years, they often blame the educator for causing poor behavior.
Other parents, staffers said at the meeting, threaten lawsuits for matters as minor as detention.
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey recorded a video last month vowing to crack down on unruly behavior inside schools, filming the spot in front of a jail.
Ivey said classrooms have descended into chaos because kids no longer fear consequences. “As a result, we are losing teachers en masse,” he said, calling disruptive students “clowns” who are impeding the education of their classmates.
Several speakers criticized Ivey at Thursday’s meeting, and highlighted that suspensions are meted out in disproportionately high numbers to black students.
“Our children are not clowns,” said a local NAACP member. “They are not snot-nosed.” He accused Ivey of using “scare tactics” and “bullying” in pushing for disciplinary clampdowns.
Another speaker said the district should emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion in any new behavior code.
“I would feel more comfortable about the discipline policy if I knew diversity was appreciated in this area,” another district parent said. “And I don’t feel it. My fear is that the practices are inconsistent when I hear about the disparities.”
One parent argued that disruptive students — regardless of race — should be removed from classrooms.
“If you are throwing a chair in a classroom, you do not belong there,” she said. “I’m sorry. If you can’t behave, that’s not my child’s fault. My child’s education should not be hindered because that child doesn’t know how to behave. And by that child I don’t mean black, white, Hispanic or any other thing. I mean the child who wasn’t taught how to behave.”
The Brevard board is developing a new disciplinary framework, and will hold future public meetings on the issue
https://nypost.com/2022/12/09/staff-quit-school-district-over-violent-and-unruly-kids/
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Educator claims advanced technology ‘causing more problems’ for students
Adding more technology to classrooms has hurt students more than helped them, a former teacher said amid speculation about the effects artificial intelligence will have on education.
“We introduce a lot of technology in the classrooms to correct problems that we see, and inevitably we end up causing more problems with the solution,” Peter Laffin, the founder of Crush the College Essay and a writing coach, told Fox News. “Often the cure is worse than the disease.”
Last week, tech company OpenAI unveiled an AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which has stunned users with its advanced functions like generating school essays for any grade level, answering open-ended analytical questions and writing jokes, poems and even computer code. The internet is swirling with predictions about the implications of this sophisticated technology, but at the forefront of Laffin’s concern is the impact it will have on education.
“I personally think that we should be restricting all sorts of technological tools, and this one I think for a very particular reason,” said Laffin, who was an English teacher of over 10 years. “We want to make sure that we’re teaching kids, not just the subject but also values.”
Laffin fears the ability of students to use AI to complete assignments will further impact an already struggling U.S. education system.
Pandemic-related remote schooling took a toll students across the U.S., with 2022 national test scores showing the largest decrease ever in math scores, while reading scores dropped to the lowest levels since 1992 for fourth and eighth graders, according to the Nation’s Report Card.
“We introduced a lot of technology to education to make our lives easier. We’ve been doing that steadily for 20 years,” Laffin said. “I think educators would do well to ask themselves, ‘how did any of this benefit us? Are our kids more educated now that there is an iPad for every student in every classroom?’”
“If we can’t say that’s been a net positive, why on earth would we encourage the use of these technologies going forward?” he added.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/09/educator-claims-technology-causing-problems-for-students/
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9 December, 2022
Loudoun School Board Fires Superintendent Who Lied About Bathroom Rape
A Virginia school board fired its superintendent Tuesday night, more than a year after The Daily Wire revealed that he lied about the rape of a female student in a girls restroom even as he pushed for a controversial transgender bathroom policy, and one day after a special grand jury corroborated its findings.
The Loudoun County school board voted unanimously to sack Scott Ziegler “without cause,” meaning that according to his contract, he will be paid a golden parachute worth some $350,000, according to Loudoun Now, which noted that the board had given Ziegler a $28,000 raise in July.
That’s despite a grand jury finding that, at a meeting a month after the rape in which board members debated a policy that would allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice, Ziegler dismissed safety concerns.
“To my knowledge we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” Ziegler said, although he was well aware that weeks earlier a skirt-wearing boy had been accused of raping a girl in a high school bathroom.
The principal of the high school where the attack occurred later testified that the superintendent’s statement was not true and another witness called it a “bald-faced lie,” according to the grand jury report.
The school system’s communications arm — which the grand jury revealed ordered staff to “TAKE NO ACTION” in response to The Daily Wire’s October 2021 inquiry informing it of its findings — similarly did not return a request for comment on the firing. The Daily Wire had also requested a copy of Ziegler’s employment contract and information on whether any action would be taken against Division Counsel Robert Falconi, who the grand jury also found at fault.
After the grand jury report was released Monday, a statement attributed to school board chair Jeff Morse and vice chair Ian Serotkin said they were “pleased” that the grand jury has not indicted anyone, even though the report painted a devastating picture and found that “throughout this ordeal LCPS administrators were looking out for their own interests instead of the best interests of LCPS.”
By Tuesday night at a meeting of the county’s other governing body, the Board of Supervisors, Democrats turned against their colleagues on the school board, with Supervisor Kristen Umstattd condemning school officials and board members for taking a “victory lap,” which she called “callous,” Loudoun Now reported.
“Let me say this as clearly as possible: Dr. Scott Ziegler needs to be fired,” Board of supervisors chair Phyllis Randall, a Democrat, said. “We had a young woman violently raped and another one assaulted, and this was for all intents and purposes, on his part, a coverup.”
Soon after, the school board, meeting separately, fired Ziegler.
On May 22, 2021, a male student wearing a skirt anally raped a ninth-grade girl in a girls bathroom at Stone Bridge High School, shortly before the school board was to vote on the transgender bathroom policy. The school did not disclose that incident publicly, nor a second sexual assault committed in a classroom by the same perpetrator on October 6. School board members only learned that the same person was behind both when The Daily Wire broke the story October 11, the report said. The second assault “could have, and should have, been prevented,” grand jurors found.
The special grand jury, which was convened pursuant to an order from Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, said it was “met with obfuscation, deflection, and obvious legal strategies designed to frustrate the special grand jury’s work,” and blamed Falconi.
“Unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover this fact pattern. For those reasons, we were unable to consider an indictment against the LCPS division counsel,” the grand jury wrote.
Scott Smith, the father of the rape victim, told The Daily Wire that “Firing Ziegler is a good first step, though it should have been done in October of 2021. However, justice will be denied until everyone whose egregious and reckless conduct was detailed in that report is terminated as well. That includes the Deputy Superintendent, Division Counsel, school board members and the other unnamed actors whose actions put our child and everyone else’s child at risk.”
Of the grand jury report, he said “The grand jury report is thorough, however, it has no teeth holding anyone accountable by name at the moment.”
But he said that a criminal standard is not the only one that applies. “There’s gonna be civil lawsuits. We’ll be filing a Title IX lawsuit in Alexandria federal court,” he said.
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Rutgers Professor on White People: 'We Gotta Take These Muthaf**kers Out'
Twitchy struck oil with this gem from a Rutgers University professor whose name made me do a double take, at least. Her name is Crunk, and she’s not a fan of the white folk. In a YouTube segment with The Root, Professor Crunk said that the end of white people is coming and that “we gotta take these motherfuckas out.” As many noted on social media, imagine if the roles were reversed and a white professor said something along these lines.
The first vestiges of this nonsense were cataloged during the Bush presidency, with David Horowitz’s book The Professors, a quasi-rap sheet for the nation’s worst of the worst concerning liberal academia. It’s matured into a more lethal cancer, which is what happens when conservatives cede ground. The impetus to do so is understandable, given that left-wingers dominate this insular, woke world.
It’s hell on earth, but if there is one thing we should learn in recent election cycles, conservatives should contest everywhere, even if the odds are insurmountable. This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last, where some unhinged academic goes off the reservation and spouts racist tropes soaked in genocidal tendencies. Eventually, the Left will overreach, and an equilibrium will return on these issues, though that’s hardly a satisfying ending.
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Indiana School Compels Staff to Hide ‘Gender Support Plans’ From Parents
An email unearthed by parents at an Indiana high school has revealed a districtwide support plan for students undergoing gender transition and a policy to withhold and hide information from students’ parents.
An Aug. 16 email sent by a counselor at Pendleton Heights High School in Pendleton, Indiana, informed teachers that a student had changed genders, provided new pronouns, and said teachers should not inform the student’s parents because they were “not supportive of the decision.”
The school counselor’s email concluded by telling teachers that if the student wanted to talk, she was to be sent to one of two counselors.
It’s not yet clear what grades or ages in K-12 instruction are covered by the school district’s policy. This particular email from a high school counselor, however, infuriated local parents and teachers.
Jason Payne, a parent with a child in that school district, South Madison Community School Corporation, told The Daily Signal in a text: “If staff at South Madison are willing to lie to parents about this—what else are they willing to lie about? How can I be assured my kid is safe while he’s at Pendleton if they can’t be trusted to be honest with me?”
This is not a unique circumstance, either. Over the last two years, dozens of “Gender Support Plans” with guidelines not to contact parents have been sent to teachers across the South Madison school district headquartered in Pendleton, counselor Kathy McCord confirmed.
Amanda Keegan, a geography and psychology teacher at Pendleton Heights High School, says she resigned in part to protest this policy.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal, Keegan said, “When I had to look at that parent, and feel like I was lying to that parent … I was sick to my stomach. I can’t lie to parents. I can’t do that again.”
Keegan also said that neither she nor other teachers had ever seen an official Gender Support Plan, whether in blank or completed form, and that she had received emails from counselors only when they were asking her to hide information from parents.
Keegan expressed distress that the school district would ask her to step between a parent and child, recalling how sick she felt when speaking with a parent who had no idea her child was on a Gender Support Plan.
The counselor who sent the Aug. 16 email, Kathy McCord, agreed to go on the record with The Daily Signal to discuss both the email she was required to send to Keegan and the South Madison district’s policies on Gender Support Plans and their origin.
McCord said she and other counselors have access to such plans, but teachers, parents, and the public do not—which she strongly disagrees with. McCord insisted that she and a few other counselors despise this district policy, describing it as both dishonest and harmful.
McCord confirmed that the school district is using the same Gender Support Plan that The Daily Signal obtained in blank form from a source who asked to remain anonymous.
McCord told The Daily Signal that this Gender Support Plan, modeled on a document at Hamilton Southeastern Schools, a school district in Fishers, Indiana, has been the policy of the South Madison school district since fall of 2021.
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8 December, 2022
Yes, an Academic Free-Speech Conference Needed Protection from the Mob
Jumping to conclusions is sometimes a big mistake. I recently became puzzled and mildly infuriated when I read that Stanford University was going to have a conference on freedom of expression and academic freedom—but was admitting only invitees, allowing no press or other interested persons to attend. That sounded like limiting expression and dissent to me.
Then I read the news accounts further and realized that Stanford’s graduate business school was making a prudent decision.
More specifically, the school’s Classical Liberal Initiative was inviting a blue-chip group of serious scholars, entrepreneurs, and free-speech activists for what looked like a stellar conference. It aimed “to identify ways to restore academic freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of speech and expression on campus and in the larger culture.”
If the school had opened the conference to a large audience, a disruptive melee would have occurred.
The inclusion of entrepreneur Peter Thiel, coauthor of The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, set the tone for the conference. Heavyweight scholars included, among others, Penn attorney Amy Wax, George Mason economist Tyler Cowen, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Stanford historian Niall Ferguson and physician Jay Bhattacharya, and NYU climate scientist Steve Koonin.
Free-speech activists included Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression; NYU’s Jonathan Haidt, co-founder of the Heterodox Academy; and Nadine Strossen, past president of the American Civil Liberties Union. Prominent victims of successful efforts to suppress legitimate expression were there, too—for example, former Princeton classics scholar Joshua Katz and former Georgetown law professor Ilya Shapiro.
All in all, this was a group of very distinguished individuals whose only offense, as far as I could see, is that they are all outspoken and (in many cases) have views inconsistent with the dominant woke ideology dominating the tonier colleges and universities.
If the business school had decided to have the conference before a large audience in a big lecture hall or auditorium, the odds are near 100 percent that a disruptive melee would have occurred, as quasi-terrorists masquerading as “students” or “faculty” would have “canceled” the proceedings.
Opening the meeting to a larger audience in the spirit of free expression would, effectively, have prevented it from happening. Hence the decision to have an invitation-only event.
Predictably, dozens of professors protested the conference in a letter, claiming that it was “a hermetically-sealed event, safe from any and all meaningful debate ... filled with self-affirmation and self-congratulation ... where racism is given shelter and immunity.” (I wonder how participants like Niall Ferguson feel when called “racist,” particularly since he is married to a black woman, the very distinguished Ayaan Hirsi Ali.)
The protesters further argued that “this deeply cynical instrumentalization of ‘academic freedom’ to protect racist lies and other mistruths is an offense to the very concept that forms the bedrock of the university.”
The Stanford protesters presumed they should have the right to do what has been done at other campuses.
The protesters were particularly galled by the presence of Penn Law Professor Wax, who serves with me on the board of the National Association of Scholars: a formidable intellect who has multiple degrees, including an M.D. from Harvard and other degrees from Oxford, Yale, and Columbia. She frequently, and refreshingly, tells “inconvenient truths,” asserting, for example, that, on average, black students at Penn Law do less well than others, which the woke protesters (not to mention Penn Law’s dean, Ted Ruger) believe is unacceptable. Never mind that there is a literature (e.g. Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help) highly consistent with that perspective.
The Stanford protesters presumed they should have the right to do what has been done at other campuses (e.g, the “cancellations” of Charles Murray at Middlebury College, Heather Mac Donald at Claremont McKenna, and, most recently, Ann Coulter at Cornell): namely, to disrupt proceedings and prevent speakers’ right to speak—the “my way or the highway” approach to so-called academic inquiry.
To blunt criticism of not being open to the public, the conference organizers decided to livestream the event, enabling the public to listen and, if so moved, even to put on counter events and conferences, but not to disturb the proceedings at Stanford. This seemed like an excellent solution to the problem. And Stanford administration seemed to handle the brouhaha reasonably well, a rarity among leaders of top universities these days.
That brings me to a fundamental point. Universities themselves should be viewed as places where members of an academic community gather to discuss ideas of the day. They should generally not take stands on issues. The opinion of the president of XYZ University should not be construed as representing the policy position of the institution, since universities are comprised of many individuals with diverse viewpoints, each of which should be heard. University presidents and deans should keep quiet as a rule on public policy matters.
To be sure, if Russia ordered a successful nuclear missile strike on New York City, it probably would be appropriate for university presidents to condemn the event. But it is better to err in the direction of remaining neutral than to make institutional policy pronouncements on behalf of a diverse campus community. In short, universities should be true “marketplaces of ideas,” not moral or political arbiters on issues of the day.
In a perfect world, where people showed civility and respect for spirited scholarly discourse, we could have an academic-freedom conference where perhaps one-third of the speakers were free-speech advocates; one-third took a more authoritarian, woke position, suggesting that certain ideas should not be given currency on campus on moral grounds; and one-third were persons in the middle, finding some merit in both perspectives.
Audience members could be told that they could applaud or boo in moderation, but that more aggressive disruptive behaviors designed to stifle the airing of certain perspectives would lead to arrest, dismissal from school, or other sanctions.
The problem, of course, is that, in contemporary America, we increasingly deviate from a perfect world. The rules that constrain violence and disruptive behavior are increasingly ignored; the Ten Commandments are routinely violated, not to mention our laws. The rule of law and tolerance for alternative perspectives are under attack, not only in our broader society, as evidenced by urban rioting every time a perceived injustice is created, but also in the academic villages that we call colleges and universities.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14355
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Oklahoma Decision Could Pave the Way for Religious Charter Schools Nationwide
A newly released opinion in Oklahoma could open the door to tuition-free religious schools, funded by the public, across the country.
The state’s attorney general says Oklahoma has no grounds to prohibit religious charter schools, paving the way for what could be the nation’s first Catholic charter school.
The opinion advises the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board not to enforce a prohibition against licensing religious charter schools because the “U.S. Supreme Court would likely hold these restrictions unconstitutional,” the attorney general, John O’Connor, said.
The opinion comes in response to a query from the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, which last November told the SVCSB it intends to apply for a charter. The board then requested the opinion of the attorney general on the matter, a representative of the SVCSB said.
The executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, Brett Farley, called the opinion “a watershed moment for the school choice movement.
“It’s a major crack in the dam that ultimately we think is going to open up and allow quite a bit more access to quality education across the board, not just in Oklahoma,” Mr. Farley told the Sun.
If Mr. O’Connor’s arguments hold up in federal court, it would allow millions of religious families to send their children to religious schools — without tuition payments, like all charter schools.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools operated and maintained by private bodies — with operating licenses from the state. They educate more than 3 million students in 44 states across the union, all of which prohibit sectarian instruction.
Oklahoma’s current law requires that charter schools be “nonsectarian in … programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.” Charter-granting institutions “may not authorize a charter school or program that is affiliated with a nonpublic sectarian school or religious institution.”
The state attorney general said both of these stipulations would likely fail to meet the “strict scrutiny” of the highest court, citing a spate of recent Supreme Court cases prohibiting discrimination against religious schools when it comes to public benefits, including, most recently, Carson v. Makin.
In Carson, the Supreme Court ruled that a Maine voucher program was unconstitutional because families could not apply funds to religious schools solely on the basis of their religious affiliation. Chief Justice Roberts described such a prohibition as “discrimination against religion” and a violation of the First Amendment.
The case for religious charter schools, the opinion noted, may be trickier than for the inclusion of religious schools in voucher programs because of charter schools’ status as public schools — with significant autonomy. Mr. O’Connor cited a decision by the riders of the Ninth Circuit that charter schools are not “state actors,” at least when it comes to employment law.
There is, however, a circuit split on the question, following a decision this past spring by the Fourth Circuit against a North Carolina charter school’s uniform policy. The question of whether charter schools are indeed state actors may be taken up by the Supreme Court if it agrees to hear an appeal on the Fourth Circuit ruling.
“The opinion does not have the force of law,” a law professor at Notre Dame, Nicole Garnett, said, but the opinion signals that the attorney general would defend the permissibility of religious charters in a lawsuit.
Ms. Garnett is a longtime advocate for the possibility of religious charters and was cited in Mr. O’Connor’s opinion.
“I think if a religious charter school is authorized anywhere, there will be a lawsuit saying it violates the Establishment Clause,” Ms. Garnett told the Sun. Many of the relevant questions, she adds, will only be established and settled through litigation.
The statute in question remains on the books, but Republican majorities in the Oklahoma legislature could overturn it if the political will exists. Members of the education committee in the state senate did not return requests for comment.
The Republican governor of the Sooner State, Kevin Stitt, praised the opinion, which he said “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.”
The archdiocese hopes to open a virtual charter school — joining the six charters in Oklahoma that currently offer exclusively online classroom instruction.
Archbishop Paul Coakley wrote to the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board last November. In the letter, he laid out a constitutional argument in favor of allowing religious charter schools.
“The Archdiocese is enthusiastic about sponsoring a virtual charter school to improve educational opportunities for children and families in the state,” Archbishop Coakley wrote. “Yet we cannot ignore the reality that, regrettably, the discriminatory and unlawful exclusion of religious schools remains at least formally on the books of the state’s Charter School Act.”
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‘Book ban’ angers academics amid claims University of Tasmania ‘in crisis’ due to ‘all powerful’ VC and management ‘cadre’
A war on tall bookshelves?? Bureaucracy gone mad. As you would expect of a retired academic, I have tall bookshelves at home. Am I in danger? Would I be welcome in Tasmania?
University of Tasmania academics say they have been ordered to remove books from shelves and throw away their “life’s work”, all in the name of “safer spaces”.
A parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday heard senior academics allege UTAS was in “crisis” and had “lost its direction” due to an erosion of academic influence by a rampant “management cadre”.
“What we’ve been seeing in recent times is the growth in the management level and them assuming more of a role in directing academic activities,” UTAS Emeritus Professor Stuart McLean told the Legislative Council inquiry. “As an example, an edict came around recently that books were to be removed from shelves in … academic offices.”
Outside the inquiry, several academics confirmed to The Australian they had been ordered to remove books above shoulder-height, as well as all records that will not be used in the next year.
“You can’t have anything left in the office – it is deeply puzzling, and quite bizarre,” said one academic, on condition of anonymity. “Most academic offices are lined with books … and dumping much of your life’s work in the bin is hard to do.”
Academics said some had dodged the safety auditors, retaining ceiling-high books; others had been allowed to keep some above shoulder-height as long as they had an “industrially-rated step ladder”.
UTAS safety and wellbeing director Chris Arnold said any actions were about “keeping our people safe”. “Throughout 2020 and 2021, we ran a series of safety-focused clean-up days in all areas of the university, which resulted in cleaner, safer spaces for our staff and students,” Mr Arnold said.
“Some of the advice we provided included ensuring workspaces were not cluttered in ways that inhibited access or created fire and trip hazards, and that heavy items – like large books or boxes of equipment and items like glass sample slides – were not kept on shelves above shoulder height.”
The LegCo is inquiring into UTAS’ governance under state law, with peak bodies hoping it will lead to a model to restore academic freedom at universities nationally.
Senior academics are pushing for an increase in elected academic representation on key bodies.
Distinguished Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick told the inquiry even UTAS’ academic senate, of which he was until recently a member, was dominated by managers.
“So the majority of people on the academic senate are in upper level management positions and a minority are elected from the academics,” Professor Kirkpatrick told the inquiry.
“It’s not really giving an academic perspective on the courses and on the teaching programs. It’s a perspective that’s dominated by the people who are managing the university.”
Distinguished Professor Jeff Malpas told the inquiry UTAS was “in crisis” and “looking like a third or fourth rate” institution, due to the “McKinsey-ite” management model of Vice Chancellor Rufus Black.
“The governance structure has fallen into complete decay as a result of a centralised approach that concentrates effectively all power in the VC – and that’s a sure-fire recipe for disaster,” Professor Malpas said.
Former UTAS chancellor Michael Field has defended the current UTAS council as having the “right balance” and dismissed the reform push as a “harking back” by “retired academics”.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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7 December, 2022
Kansas Law School Silent After Diversity Committee Demonizes Christian Law Firm, Spurring Top State Judge to Resign
A justice on the Kansas Supreme Court resigned from his teaching position at the University of Kansas School of Law after an administrator tried to convince students to cancel an event featuring a senior lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and a school diversity committee condemned that Christian legal organization as a purveyor of “hate speech.”
Representatives of the University of Kansas Law School did not respond to multiple requests for comment about whether the school endorses the accusation, which appears to trace back to the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center’s accusation that Alliance Defending Freedom is a “hate group.”
The leftist SPLC places Alliance Defending Freedom—which has won multiple cases at the Supreme Court in recent years—on the same map with Ku Klux Klan organizations. As I note in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced many scandals in recent years and even notable left-leaning advocates who support it have defended ADF from this charge.
On Nov. 25, in a letter resigning his teaching position at the law school, Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall wrote to Dean Stephen Mazza that students told him that an associate dean and a professor met with leaders of the school’s Federalist Society chapter and “pressured the students to cancel the event” with ADF’s Jordan Lorence, a senior counsel and director of strategic engagement.
Stegall identified the associate dean as Leah Terranova and the professor as Pam Keller.
“The student leaders were told several times to consider what this would do to their reputation,” Stegall wrote.
The law school allowed the Federalist Society event with Lorence to go ahead, but suggested that it would damage students’ future prospects for a legal career.
After the meeting with student leaders but before the event took place, the entire KU Law community received an email from a panel called the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Committee. That email, accessible here, accused Alliance Defending Freedom of purveying “hate speech.”
“The legal positions of the ADF—particularly as they relate to the rights, freedoms and humanity of the LGBTQ+ community and its individual members—do not align with the values of the law school,” the committee wrote. “ADF has taken legal positions designed to criminalize homosexuality, demonize trans people, and degrade the civil rights of members of the LGBTQ+ community. As such, the interests and activities of ADF are antithetical to the inclusion and belonging we strive to achieve on our campus.”
“The University of Kansas School of Law unequivocally condemns hate speech,” the diversity committee continued.
The committee grudgingly noted that “as a school of law at a public university, we are bound by the tenets of the First Amendment and its protection of freedom of speech and expression, including hate speech.”
Yet the panel concluded by urging “all members of the KU Law School community to remember and reflect upon the values and responsibilities we hold as members and future members of the legal profession, including our obligation to promote justice for all people.”
Stegall, the state Supreme Court justice, noted in his resignation letter that “the email, by implication, accused the student leaders of the KU Law Federalist Society of facilitating hate speech.”
“Worse,” Stegall wrote, “the email made it very clear that the principles of free and open dialogue are only acquiesced to as a legal obligation at KU Law—they are not celebrated, cherished, or valued.”
In the diversity committee’s email, the justice said, “the student members of the KU Law Federalist Society chapter were held up before the entire community as pariahs.”
Stegall also noted that only a few days after the KU event with Lorence, the Kansas Bar Association hosted an Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer at a continuing legal education event for all Kansas lawyers—and a KU law professor appeared on stage with the ADF lawyer.
“Is KU Law prepared to accuse the KBA, [one of its own professors], and the Kansas Supreme Court of facilitating hate speech? Somehow I doubt it,” Stegall wrote.
The justice went on to lament the irony that the diversity committee appears to be “the operational arm of a bigger effort to silence large segments of our society.”
He said he resigned to avoid providing “tacit support” for a trend that “so clearly threatens the basic pillars of our profession.”
Neither the diversity committee, nor Keller, nor a law school spokesperson responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment on whether they stand by this “hate speech” accusation or the SPLC’s accusation that ADF is a “hate group.” Mazza also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
ADF’s Lorence told The Daily Signal: “It is incredibly concerning that a prominent law school, which should be training future lawyers to persuade others through logic and legal principles, is instead actively working to suppress free expression on campus.”
Lorence added:
It is extremely troubling that the administration is relying on deliberate mischaracterizations from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a thoroughly discredited, blatantly partisan activist organization with zero moral authority. Those from across the political spectrum—including Nadine Strossen, former head of the ACLU—have voiced their objections to ADF’s inclusion on the SPLC’s list, which progressive writer Nathan J. Robinson has called “an outright fraud” and “a willful deception.”
Disreputable ideologues shouldn’t be able to make the rules about whose views are allowed on campus and whose aren’t. This is contrary to everything a law school should be teaching. We must restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse at KU and other law schools, or the future of the legal profession will remain in dire straits.
In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center fired its co-founder, saw its president step down, and had a former employee reveal that the “hate group” list is a cynical fundraising scam. The scandal followed accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment, some of which traced back decades.
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Florida School Cuts Ties With LGBT Group Over Explicit Card Game
Duval County Public Schools has ended a 25-year relationship with a local LGBT youth organization citing “apparent inappropriate conduct.”
Jacksonville Area Sexual Minority Youth Network (JASMYN) fell out of favor with the school district after a parent complained after seeing a social media post by the organization showing a minor participating in a lewd novelty card game.
The post that raised concerns was about a JASYMN event called “Satargaze,” said Melissa Bernhardt, lead educator for the Duval County chapter of County Citizens Defending Freedom.
“The post was removed from their Instagram account,” Bernhardt said. “But I’m very proud that the superintendent moved quickly on this.”
The memory game by Drunk Stoned or Stupid involves collecting matched pairs of images of male genitalia of varying sizes and skin colors. It can be found on web stores such as Amazon, and is marked with a disclaimer that it’s for players at least 18 years old.
“The district simply cannot partner with the organization given their use of program materials that the district believes to be inappropriate for use with children,” Duval County Superintendent Diana Greene wrote in a prepared statement released on Nov. 29.
“Although JASMYN has been a partner to the district for over 20 years, providing support and resources for students, staff, and the community, we have decided to terminate our current services agreement with their organization.”
In an interview with News4Jax television station, JASMYN CEO Cindy Watson called the post a “regrettable mistake” but said the game was never available to minors.
“We never use that game on our campus with teenagers or with 13-year-olds,” Watson said in the interview. “In particular, we’ve never done sex education of any kind, including that game.”
JASYMN’s focus is on counteracting bullying and harassment that the LGBT community “encounters every day,” Watson said. JASYMN also provides health services, including rapid HIV testing, counseling, and education for ages 13 to 29.
Watson posted a statement on JASYMN’s website calling the school board’s decision to sever the relationship “hasty.”
The school district’s move was “an overreaction to a far-right extremist website spreading inflammatory misinformation about our HIV prevention work with young adults,” Watson said in her statement.
According to its 2021 annual report, JASYMN took in $4.08 million in revenue.
Of that income, 49 percent came from contributions, and 24 percent came from government grants. The remaining 18 percent is from private donations, events, and in-kind contributions.
In the organization’s 2020 report, JASMYN reported an income of $2.5 million, with 40 percent coming from government grants and 20 percent from private grants. The remaining 40 percent came from in-kind contributions and private donations.
The organization’s contract with Duval County Schools provided a maximum payment of $45,000 per year. The contract calls for JASYMN to develop programs and activities related to HIV/STD prevention and start Gay-Straight Alliance clubs in Duval County schools.
The district also gave $180,000 to JASMYN from July 2019 to September 2021 through a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) grant called the Division of Adolescent Sexual Health (DASH) grant, records show. The grant focuses on three key areas addressing high-risk behaviors including “sexual health services, sexual health education, and safe and supportive environments.”
The district will determine if additional resources are needed to fill the void left after severing ties with JASMYN, Greene said.
She said she’ll ask the district’s office of equity and inclusion, as well as the health and the physical education department, to provide any additional support for students with concerns about HIV/STD transmission or mental-wellness issues.
Watching out for issues that expose children to inappropriate materials is a big part of what CCDF does, said Sarah Calamunci, who works in leadership in the organization’s education division.
“CCDF-USA is dedicated to protecting children and families,” Calamunci told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.
When the organization first spots a problem, representatives take it up with officials privately. If the matter isn’t addressed in the way the organization hopes, it makes the matter public.
“Fortunately, with JASMYN, there was a collaborative effort to shine light, and the efforts of many increased community awareness,” Calamunci said. “This public awareness and pressure resulted in DCPS canceling all contracts with JASMYN.”
The district will face another controversial topic on Dec. 6 when school board members vote on a new sex education curriculum.
At a September meeting, outraged parents showed up to complain about the supplemental materials the schools planned to use that consisted of colorful condoms and seven-inch wooden “condom demonstrators” in the shape of male genitalia in sex-ed classes.
The materials were intended for use by students in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.
Just before the meeting, the school district pulled discussion of the materials from the agenda, saying a plan to use alternative materials would be developed, instead.
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Australia: Courtney spent four years at uni. Two more years before she could teach was asking too much
Absurd. Even a one-year diploma is mostly a waste. Classroom apprenticeship is all that is needed
Two-year master’s teaching degrees should be abandoned in favour of a one-year course to help plug chronic teacher shortages, cut student debt and entice people into the profession, new research has found.
Schools across the country are grappling with unprecedented teacher shortages – especially in maths and science – while confidential data reported last year showed more than 100,000 students in NSW are taught by someone without expertise in their subject.
Courtney Haroon, who has a forensic science and chemistry undergraduate degree, said she would have swapped her two-year master’s teaching qualification for a heavy-loaded, intensive one-year course if that had been an option.
“An accelerated course wasn’t an option, but a one-year degree and then going into paid, supervised work in the classroom is a great solution,” said Haroon, who is in her first year of work at Gilroy Catholic College in Castle Hill and plans to teach year 11 and 12 chemistry.
“I was searching for a lab-technician job, but I realised I needed to be helping other people.”
A policy paper released by conservative think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) argues mandating a two-year requirement for postgraduate teaching is crippling supply and is a major disincentive to aspiring teachers, particularly those wanting a mid-career change.
It means students are hit with double the tuition fees, at roughly $4000-a-year, and are delayed in earning income, which in NSW public schools is $70,652 for the first year of teaching, the paper says.
Figures from October show 2458 vacant full-time teaching positions across more than 1200 NSW schools; and 75 public schools in NSW have five or more full-time teacher vacancies, with 36 of these in Sydney.
Last month Castle Hill High, Alexandria Park Community school, Northbourne Public and Murrumbidgee High had more than 10 vacancies each.
The one-year graduate diploma of education, currently held by about 60,000 teachers nationally, was phased out from 2016, and students now complete a two-year master’s course and pass literacy and numeracy tests, while undergraduate students take on a four-year degree.
The number of people gaining a postgraduate qualification in education has declined by 23 per cent in about a decade.
Glenn Fahey, education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, said the two-year master’s is a “regulatory relic”, and the longer course is no guarantee a new teacher is more prepared for the classroom.
“About 60,000 teachers hold a one-year graduate diploma. Are we implying that something’s wrong with their skill set? If we can confidently say that as the evidence suggests that these teachers are as effective and as knowledgeable in the classroom as their peers it waters away the justification for the longer qualification,” Fahey said.
“We need more teachers, but we’ve created more obstacles making it harder to become one.”
Report author Rob Joseph said the assumption that lengthier degrees produce higher standards was unfounded.
“A longer degree is no guarantee a new teacher is more prepared for the classroom. It’s the quality of time in training, not the quantity of time, that leads to teachers being classroom-ready,” he said.
Data from the Universities Admissions Centre, which only captures post-grad students who apply through UAC to some NSW universities, shows a spike in applications in the first year of the pandemic. However, it was at a six-year low for 2022 entry, with 580 applicants.
Teaching standards are set by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, and the institute’s deputy chief executive, Edmund Misson, said one year was not enough time to learn how to teach well.
“Teachers need good preparation, and we don’t think that can be done in 12 months of equivalent full-time study,” Misson said.
Claire Wyatt-Smith, the director of the Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at ACU, said one-year teaching degrees could be appropriate in some instances.
“If the first degree a student completes covers content knowledge and skills for the curriculum content the person will teach, then a one-year postgraduate teaching degree could be appropriate,” she said, adding that making sure students have adequate experience in classroom is critical.
A spokesperson for the NSW Education Department said the number of permanent vacancies in public schools fluctuates throughout the year for a range of reasons, but most position movement occurs towards the end of the school year.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said it was hard to switch mid-career, especially when you have a mortgage and children, which is why he has asked his teacher education expert panel to consider options such as paid internships.
Shadow federal education minister Alan Tudge welcomed the CIS report which backs the Coalition’s position on initial teacher education.
“Understandably, not many professionals can afford to take two years off work mid-career to retrain as a teacher. Shorter pathways are required if we are to make this an attractive choice for the best and the brightest,” Tudge said.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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6 December, 2022
NYC Looks To Lure Disabled Students, and Their Dollars, Back to Public Schools
New York City’s education chief is making a pitch to parents of disabled students who have left the public school system: Give us a second chance.
The chancellor, David Banks, on Monday announced a slate of initiatives intended to improve special education offerings in the city’s public schools.
The announcement comes several months after the chancellor took heat for attacking tuition payment programs for disabled students, accusing such programs of siphoning public school funding.
“All this money that is meant for the kids in our public schools are going to private schools,” Mr. Banks said in August. “This is money that’s going out the back door every single day.”
He took an accusatory tone toward families using the tuition subsidies. “Folks have figured out how to game this system,” Mr. Banks said. He was censured by advocates for students with disabilities and parents who relied on the subsidies.
The dollars in question fund tuition payments for “Carter cases,” referring to the 1993 Supreme Court ruling in Florence County School District Four v. Carter. The court ruled that local school districts can be sued for private school tuition costs if they do not provide an adequate education for disabled students.
If Mr. Banks can win back these families, New York city’s public schools stand to gain almost a billion dollars in funding — if it really is a zero-sum between the Carter cases and public schools.
In the 2022 fiscal year, the city spent more than $500 million on tuition payments for Carter cases and another $400 million on services related to program administration, according to a report from the city’s independent budget office. The administration fees mostly consisted of payments to education consultants and legal fees associated with the suits.
Public school advocates see these funds as being “taken away” from the public school system. School choice proponents, however, have long argued that taxpayer dollars should “follow the student.”
Spending on such tuition payments has climbed steadily over the past few years, especially since Mayor Bloomberg left office. Mayor de Blasio’s administration championed the program and made tuition grants more accessible to parents of disabled children.
“A lot of folks have left our system and we have to pay exorbitant numbers for folks to leave and go other places,” Mr. Banks said at a press conference last week.
During the press conference he announced a $205 million investment in programs for students with autism and sensory disorders, new internship opportunities for disabled high school students, and the formation of a Special Education Advisory Council.
He directed part of his address specifically to parents of disabled students who had left the public school system.
“I hope that today marks the beginning of an announcement that helps rebuild your trust with our schools and will give you a reason to come back to your local public school,” Mr. Banks said.
Overall enrollment in New York’s public schools has declined nearly 10 percent since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Enrollment has fallen annually since 2016.
In the 2019-20 academic year, more than a million students were enrolled in the city’s public schools. This year, the city projects enrollment is fewer than 900,000 pupils.
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The Grand Jury Report on 'Obstructionist' Loudoun County Public Schools Is Brutal
A special grand jury report on the conduct of Loudoun County Public Schools relating to their handling of and reaction to the sexual assault of a student at Broad Run High School by an alleged assailant — who was accused of a similar previous assault when attending Stone Bridge High School — was released on Monday. The grand jury did not hold back in its criticism of school and district authorities, and noted that it would have considered an indictment against the LCPS division counsel if statute's existed to allow charges.
In addition to calling out Loudoun County Public Schools for weak leadership, misplaced priorities, attempts to tamper with witness testimony, and failing to fully address issues that arise within the LCPS community, the grand jury also issued several recommendations to deal with some of the problems their deliberations identified.
The conclusion of the grand jury's report summarizes some of the issues within LCPS:
Although LCPS has taken positive steps forward resulting from the sexual assaults last year, such as increasing resources for Title IX compliance and updating policy 8220 (student disciplinary consequences), through this investigation we have learned LCPS as an organization tends to avoid managing difficult situations by not addressing them fully. Whether intended or not, this practice conveys to the public a sense of apathy. This has not served them or our community well, and the culture needs to change. Stronger leadership would address problems head-on instead of letting them snowball. As nine members of this community, we are certain the public would reward such leadership.
The grand jury also concluded that the Loudoun County School Board and its division counsel were acting in an "obstructionist" manner and actively attempting to thwart the grand jury's investigation by controlling "the flow of information" from those subpoenaed to testify by the grand jury.
Those attempts, the grand jury alleged, were "an effort by division counsel to get everybody on the same page to thwart, discredit, and push back against this investigation and this report, and to promote their own narrative," on the grand jury noted "is completely undermined and contradicted by the sworn testimony of the chief operation officer" who appeared with his own lawyer and to whose testimony the division counsel was not privy.
Notably, the grand jury stated that they would have considered "an indictment against the LCPS division counsel" but were unable to because, "unlike federal law, no Virginia statute explicitly addresses witness tampering, and the Virginia obstruction of justice statute does not cover this fact pattern."
Among the eight recommendations passed along are a call for better communication between school leaders. "In our examination of the circumstances that led to the two sexual assaults by the same student at two different Loudoun County high schools, we were struck by the lack of communication among LCPS, LCSO, the court services unit and the commonwealth's attorney office."
Another recommendation criticized the Loudoun County School Board for excessive citation of attorney-client privilege to avoid answering logical questions that arose after the assaults. "We appreciate and understand the necessity of the privilege to keep confidential certain communications between client and attorney. However, unlike corporate executives of a company, school board members act on behalf of the public they are elected to serve," the grand jury report states. "The attorney-client privilege should be invoked when required to protect legitimate issues of confidentiality that impact the operations of LCPS and the LCSB. It should not be used as a shield that impedes transparency, accountability, and openness, especially when it comes to the operations of a public body."
What's more, the grand jury noted that the reaction of LCPS authorities displayed an apparent failure to take seriously the assault of students under its care.
"According to the LCPS website, the state mission of the safety and security division is 'to provide a safe and secure educational environment for all students, staff, and external stakeholders. This is accomplished through the execution of a comprehensive and integrated security plan that constantly evolves to address the ever changing threat landscape,'" the grand jury noted. "Yet on the afternoon of May 28, 2021, the director of safety and security was mainly concerned with the fact that a disruptive parent was in the front office of SBHS – not that a student had been sexually assaulted or that the assailant was at-large in the school. His testimony further revealed that he never even asked what caused the parent's disruptive behavior, nor did he make any inquiries about the sexual assault victim or the alleged perpetrator."
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Australia: Teachers banned from Christmas activities, holiday countdowns
Queensland schools have been accused of playing the Christmas “grinch” after some teachers claim they were warned against hosting Christmas festivities or countdowns to the holidays in their classrooms.
The message has been slammed by the Teachers Professional Association of Queensland, which described the decisions as “grinch-like”, but the Education Department said it had not issued a directive on these issues and insisted it leaves these decisions to individual principals.
A state high school teacher posted in an online group that their school’s executive team had banned a Christmas holiday countdown because “it sends the wrong message”.
Several teachers responded to this post saying their current or former schools had similar views on Christmas activities and holiday countdowns.
However, many teachers replied saying their schools encouraged celebrations.
The Courier-Mail has seen correspondence in which a state high school staff member defends their support of students’ end-of-year celebrations after the staff member alleged they were criticised by their principal.
The staff member makes the point that they did not see the celebrations that spanned a matter of minutes affecting the students’ exam performances after a year of hard work.
TPAQ secretary Tracy Tully said she had received an estimated 50 reports in the past few weeks from members saying their school had issued directives around Christmas classroom celebrations, end-of-year celebrations, or holiday countdowns.
She said these reports were coming from state schools, describing them as “frightening” and “almost communistic”.
“This is abnormal what we’re seeing this term – the rhetoric is militant,” she said. “Teachers are feeling lost and sad that they can’t farewell their students in the ways they have done previously.
“The norm is for classes to have a party and kids to bring a plate of food and give gifts – this still happens in many primary and high schools.”
Even parents were saying they had always given Christmas gifts and now they were not sure whether they were allowed to, Ms Tully said.
“The Christmas lights have been turned out,” she said.
The Education Department said it did not issue directives around Christmas holiday countdowns or festive celebrations.
“Principals are best placed to make decisions about celebrating Christmas in their schools, in consultation with their local communities,” a department spokesman said.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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5 December, 2022
Why British Labour’s schools plan is damaging – and full of hypocrisy
The Labour Party’s education policy is damaging to the nation and highly hypocritical. It is one of several good reasons for discontented Tories to reject any suggestion that they might lend their votes to Sir Keir Starmer as a protest against their own party’s recent failures.
Let us start with the hypocrisy. Labour’s high command likes to please the party’s class-war Left by making rude noises about private schools. It is a cheap and easy way of keeping the Corbynites quiet. Yet despite having been in power, often with large majorities, for much of the post-war period, it has never significantly curbed private education.
Far from it. Labour’s biggest single education policy, the abolition of state grammar schools, was a huge shot in the arm for fee-paying schools. These had been failing quite badly by comparison with state grammars.
But as the grammars disappeared from most of the country, Britain’s independent schools welcomed thousands of new customers. These were parents so discontented with low standards at the new comprehensives that they were prepared to pay through the nose to do better.
Now Sir Keir is threatening to impose VAT on independent schools, a ferocious use of the tax system. This would not punish the rich. They can shrug it off. But it would hurt those who have sacrificed pleasures and luxuries because they think education is more important.
The plan is crowd-pleasing and dogmatic. By forcing families to send their children to hard-pressed state schools, it is likely to damage the state system.
And now comes more hypocrisy. Labour has – in practice – always admitted that private education has important good qualities. Several of its most notable figures – Clement Attlee, Hugh Gaitskell, Tony Blair – attended such schools. Several Labour politicians of the 1960s era sent their children to private schools. Even now it happens. The maverick Left-winger Diane Abbott sent her son to a private school.
Sir Keir himself, thanks to the system of direct grant schools which his party abolished, attended what was in effect a private school (and has now fully become one), though his parents never needed to pay fees. And now we learn that Sir Keir has been playing the elaborate Game of Homes, by which socialists publicly opposed to privileged private schools wangle their children into exceptional state schools.
This is privilege too. For in this way they can retain their Left-wing purity, but without suffering the low-quality education which many users of the more normal parts of the state system still endure. In this case, the primary school attended by the Labour leader’s children at one stage had a catchment area extending just 182 yards from the school itself.
It has been described locally as a ‘state-run prep school for the middle class’. Their secondary school, similarly, is in an area of North London much favoured by Left-wing grandees. It has seen its catchment area shrink in recent years, inevitably making it more socially exclusive.
This sort of behaviour is not at all unusual among senior Labour figures who somehow manage to live in the often very expensive catchment areas of unusually good London state primary and secondary schools.
Others – such as the Blairs – use religious affiliation to achieve the same result. When Labour’s elite are content to send their children to ordinary state schools without such manoeuvres, we will know that they truly believe in their own education policies.
Until then, Labour should not punish the strivers who, like the socialist upper deck, seek to escape what Labour’s own spin doctor Alastair Campbell once called the bog standard comprehensives of Britain.
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California teacher who outraged parents with BDSM materials claims it helped kids' identity development
A California teacher who boasted about a "queer library" which contained sexually explicit content, including information on BDSM/kink and orgies, said the books helped students "figur[e] out who they are."
The English teacher at San Juan Hills High, previously identified on the school's website as Danielle Serio, is known as "Flint." Fox News Digital found that Flint posted repeatedly on TikTok about sexually explicit books, which the district was later forced to respond to amid parents' outrage.
The school district previously claimed in an email to parents that the content was only available to a specific club – but that did not appear to be the case. The library was positioned in Flint's classroom, and it was available to all students, according to Flint's own commentary before Fox News Digital's story.
In a video posted on November 21, Flint discussed the outrage surrounding the "queer classroom library."
"People get really mad about my queer library. I have like 200 titles that are specific to the LGBT community that I've been curating for over eight years. Don't get me wrong, my students love that library. It has been very helpful for many students figuring out who they are, how to relate to their peers," she said.
"Everything you Ever Wanted to Know About Being Trans…" discussed BDSM, fetishes and a kink social media networking site.
"I find the BDSM/kink community to be extremely open-minded and welcoming in every way; it's a place of sexual liberation," the book stated. "There is often more blanket level of acceptance of transgender people within the kink/BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism) scenes and sites such as FetLife."
FetLife is a social media networking site for the "kink community."
Another book called "This Book is Gay" discusses the casual hookup site "Grindr" and includes detailed information on how to have anal and "girl on girl" sex.
"We all want to have sex with loads of people," the book states. "[T]he prostate gland… feels amazing when massaged. Lots of men, gay or straight, like how this feels."
"Let's talk about dildos: I think a lot of people assume that where there is no penis, a desperate sexual void is created, out of which something [bleep] shaped must ultimately slot in order to satisfy," the book continued. "I've only every slept with two women who enjoyed using dildos. I hate wearing a strap-on. I've only every done it once and NEVER AGAIN!"
It also included information on sex parties and orgies.
"Saunas, or 'bath houses,' are dotted all over the country, and they are perfectly legal. People (many saunas run lesbian nights) pay some money to enter and then have a bit of a sauna and some random sex. Again, this is fine as long as you're safe."
Another book, "The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality," also discusses kink and fetishes as well as "tucking" – the process of hiding one's penis and "whorephobia" – stigma against prostitutes.
Following outrage from parents in the district, an email was sent out, which was obtained by Fox News Digital, that claimed the books were only part of an extracurricular club. The district also asked for "civility."
"We are aware of a news article questioning the appropriateness of books that were in a student club library," the district said. "The books referenced were available through a high school extra-curricular club and are not instructional materials. However, we have initiated a review of these books, which are currently not available to students."
Fox News Digital asked about the status of the review but did not immediately receive a response.
"There shouldn't be porn allowed in classrooms," David Averell, a parent in the district, told Fox News Digital. "What was in the classroom pretty much made me sick."
It wasn't the first time Flint responded to criticism following the controversy. On another occasion, Flint questioned whether "waves of criticism" against the teacher were legitimate.
"So as a trans teacher with a pretty public platform, there will often be waves of criticism that I know better than to internalize. Every once in a while there will be that little voice that says something like, ‘What if they are right? What if all my efforts on this Earth are all for naught.’ In those moments, it is helpful to step back, take myself way out of it," Flint said.
On another occasion, Flint said, "I want people who follow me to know that I believe very much in what I'm doing, and I think my history as a teacher speaks for itself."
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Australia: ‘We changed everything’: How 56 schools transformed their teaching and boosted results
In Rebecca Brady’s kindergarten classroom students answer a string of rapid-fire questions about nouns and verbs as they hop between coloured hula-hoops splayed on the floor.
The energetic exchange means easily distracted six-year-olds barely have time to look away before Brady pulls their attention to the next exercise. They are captivated.
“It’s playful and fun, but the teacher is in control and leading the lesson,” she explains.
For the past two years, her school, St Bernard’s primary just south of Batemans Bay, has been in the midst of a classroom revolution.
“We’ve changed our whole approach to teaching. We use a lot of repetition, fast-paced learning and intense explicit instruction; behaviour is improving, and the children are so engaged. It’s been a huge turnaround. Kids don’t have time to disengage.”
Brady is one of hundreds of teachers across 56 Catholic schools in NSW and the ACT that have embraced “high-impact” explicit instruction, an approach partly embedded in old-school teaching methods. It shuns student-led and inquiry-based learning in favour of a direct, traditional instruction style.
Behind the teaching overhaul is Ross Fox, the head of Catholic education in the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, who fours years ago decided stagnating academic results across his stable of schools required urgent attention. He called on Lorraine Hammond, an influential explicit teaching advocate from Edith Cowan University, who has implemented “high-impact instruction programs” at more than 50 schools in Western Australia and the Kimberley region.
“Any school that takes up a teacher-led approach to instruction will achieve outstanding results because learning to read, write and spell are not naturally occurring processes,” says Hammond.
Teachers and principals from the Canberra Goulburn archdiocese visited Western Australia to see how explicit teaching, regular assessment and phonics-based reading programs were being rolled out at a handful of schools there.
“I felt a huge moral imperative to turn things around. We had to think deeply about why what we were doing in the past wasn’t translating into improved results, particularly in reading,” Fox says.
“If you want students to know something, you tell them. We know there is a way the brain learns, a science behind it, and effective classroom instruction involves breaking down information into small chunks and then building on that, rather than letting the student lead their learning.
“This approach is one way we can try and close the equity gap in student outcomes,” he says.
The 56 schools are at the end of their second year adopting the explicit, evidence-based teaching approach, known as the Catalyst program, and internal analysis of NAPLAN results shows promising signs.
“Our primary schools are showing statistically significant improvement in NAPLAN reading between 2019 and 2022 for year 3 and year 5. And results have improved relative to NSW averages, particularly for reading,” Fox says.
At St Bernard’s, where a quarter of students are from a disadvantaged background, this year’s NAPLAN results are even more pronounced: 94 per cent of year 5 students achieved the top four bands for reading. In 2017, this was just 69 per cent.
Almost 90 per cent of students achieved in the top four bands for year 5 numeracy, compared to 73 per cent in 2017.
“Before we changed everything we were throwing too much information at the kids at once. Children can only process new information when broken down in pieces and then building on that. It’s how knowledge is moved to long-term memory,” Brady, who has been a teacher for a decade, says.
Fox believes one of the key changes has been improved co-operation across the schools, largely due to the common approach and schools and teachers are now learning from each other.
“Previously we had half of school cohorts in tutoring and intervention programs. Dramatically improving results was the only option,” he says.
All the classrooms across the system are simple: desks generally face the front of the room – rather than in huddled groups – and the teacher instructs from the front of the room.
“Quite a few of our schools have had to buy new furniture because a lot of it was designed to have pupils facing each other,” Fox says.
“Teachers need to keep control of students’ attention. You don’t want children looking and talking to their friends unnecessarily as part of the lesson. Desks are now lined in rows, student face the front, and they frequently use small whiteboards to answer teacher questions to demonstrate they’ve understood a concept.”
The changes adopted at Fox’s schools are aligned with the phonics-based approach taken in NSW primary schools, which is embedded in its new kindergarten to year 2 curriculum, after internal Department of Education research found balanced literacy to be less effective.
NSW students improved in primary school reading in the latest NAPLAN results, and are ranked in the top three jurisdictions by mean scores in all domains.
“At St Bernard’s there is a sense of order and rigour in their teaching. It has it transformed the academic lives of the students but changed the culture of the school too,” says Hammond
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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4 December, 2022
The College Admissions Process Has Changed in a Big Way
The pandemic affected nearly every facet of life—college included. The changes are going beyond what seems to be an endless freeze on student loan payments and virtual learning. It's also upended the traditional admissions process, which of course, determines who has the privilege of stepping foot on campus.
And despite health restrictions getting rolled back in most places in the country, this looks to be a change that could last well beyond the pandemic.
According to the nonprofit that publishes the Common Application, only 4 percent of colleges now require applicants submit SAT or ACT test scores, which has long provided colleges and universities with a standard metric with which to evaluate academic ability and, in some cases, scholarship eligibility. And fewer than half of early applicants submitted them this fall.
This is a significant change from where things stood pre-pandemic.
The data point could mark a watershed moment in admissions, college advisers say, when a pandemic pause in SAT and ACT testing requirements evolved into something more permanent.
Just three years ago, 78 percent of applicants included test scores in their early Common App submissions, a round of admissions that ends Nov. 1.
The share of applicants reporting SAT or ACT scores plunged in 2020, as COVID-19 shuttered testing sites and drove hundreds of colleges to adopt “test-optional” admissions.
Many observers expected the testing requirement to return as restrictions lifted. It hasn’t.
“We’ve actually seen an increase in the share of colleges on the Common App that don’t require a test score,” said Preston Magouirk, senior manager of research and analytics at Common App.
More than 1,800 colleges are “test-optional” this year, including most elite public and private campuses, according to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, or FairTest.
Common App data shows that only 4 percent of colleges require test scores for applications this fall, down from 55 percent in pre-pandemic 2019. The group includes a handful of technical universities and Florida’s state university system. (The Hill)
Admissions experts don't think the trend will reverse course, either.
"I think it's harder to go back," Jed Applerouth, founder of Applerouth Tutoring Services in Atlanta, told The Hill. "When you go test-optional, you have the freedom to build the class you want to build."
While the "test-optional" movement began long before 2020—Bowdoin College started it back in 1970—it picked up steam in the 2000s "amid concerns about equity," according to The Hill.
The trend has also gone beyond undergraduate schools. A council of the American Bar Association voted last month to scrap the LSAT and other standardized testing requirements for admissions starting in 2025.
Diversity has emerged as a central focus of the current testing debate, with the ABA receiving nearly 120 public comments on the matter. Some have called the LSAT a roadblock to building a diverse legal profession while others argued that it is an equalizer that helps underprivileged aspiring lawyers.
Without the testing requirement, admissions offices might place more weight on undergraduate grade-point averages, recommendations or the prestige of an applicants' undergraduate university — which are more subjective factors that could hurt the chances of diverse candidates, the 60 law deans warned in their letter to the ABA. (Reuters)
The proposed rule change heads to a vote in February before the ABA's House of Delegates.
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'Just Enjoying All the Confusion': Deviant Elementary School Teacher Admits What the Real Agenda Is
Transgender music teacher Blaine Banghart works with elementary school students in the Caddo Parish district of Shreveport, Louisiana.
He has come under fire from concerned parents after proudly admitting in two early November Facebook posts that he’s “just enjoying all the confusion” he’s causing his students over his gender identity.
The nonbinary educator, whom students address as Mx. Banghart (not a typo), wrote, “I’m not allowed to tell kids I’m trans or non-binary or that I’m not a girl. I showed up today with a new haircut and presenting much more masc than usual. The kids are all confused and asking why I have a mustache if I’m a girl, if I’m Mr. Banghart now, why am I trying to look like a boy, etc.”
He continued, “I’m just ignoring questions/redirecting so I don’t get in trouble. Though some of the reactions are hurtful (I’m not mad — they’re kids and don’t mean harm), I’m mostly just enjoying all the confusion about ‘what’ I am. Wondering what they’re going to do when I have the mustache AND a skirt later this week lol.”
Funny, huh?
In a second post, Banghart said, “I just had a parent ask me my preferred adjectives because she wanted to comment on one of my photos, but she wanted to use words that I liked hearing for myself. That’s the kind of allyship that I need, A plus.”
This wasn’t the first time parents have spoken up about Banghart’s attire and his interactions with students. Fox News Digital reported that, during a Caddo Parish School Board meeting held in March, parents expressed concern about a video posted to TikTok in which he voiced his frustration over his “inability to be out at work.”
The district’s chief technology officer, Keith Hanson, defended Banghart at that meeting. According to Fox, Hanson said, “I have never spoken here as a citizen or parent of a student, but I am here today because this is important to me, my family and, most importantly, to her [Banghart]. Let everyone see on public record that there are good people here ready to defend other good people from vile, bigoted hate.”
It appears that Hanson is misconstruing Banghart’s motives. This so-called “educator” is openly admitting that he enjoys confusing children about gender and sexuality. And this may arguably be the left’s true agenda. It sure appears that way.
Banghart was hired to teach music to Caddo Parish elementary school students. Educating them on his perception of gender identity was never part of his job description. His delight over confusing young and impressionable students about his own gender dysphoria is contemptible.
The Western Journal reached out to the school district for comment. Here is their response: “Caddo Parish Public Schools cannot comment on personnel matters regarding individual employees of the school system.”
Imagine some of these students competing in the real world 20 years from now with individuals who’ve been educated in more traditional school systems. They will be insisting that men can get pregnant and that sometimes doctors are wrong when they determine the sex of a newborn baby. This will put them at a serious disadvantage.
Gender ideology, the idea that gender is a fluid construct rather than an undeniable biological fact, has made its way into just about every part of our culture. The pandemic forced the public to face wokeism head-on. Parents became aware, some for the very first time, of how deeply the woke worldview had already infected public school curricula.
The left has celebrated the transgender movement in the United States unabashedly, praising gender-confused individuals for their courage and passing policies to cement “gender identity” into our legal code as well as our national discourse.
This pathetic bow to the woke will not end well. What if some of these individuals have been misdiagnosed? What if, rather than suffering from gender dysphoria, they are actually struggling with trauma, depression or something else?
How far will it go? A middle school parent with whom I chatted recently said her children’s public school has normalized “furries.” She told me: “Furries go to school acting like cats or dogs. They literally meow or woof, and their teachers must treat them like animals. They have their own litter box in the bathroom and everything.”
It almost makes me pine for the days of bullying. Imagine how middle school students would have dealt with a “furry” 10 or 15 years ago. But, I suppose, if children are allowed to decide their gender, why not let them decide their species as well?
This is a dangerous ideology and, if left unchecked, the consequences for America’s children, adults and society as a whole will be grievous.
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What I Saw Attending College in ‘The People’s Republic of Boulder’
Decades ago, KGB spy Yuri Bezmenov defected to America and exposed a four-step plan the Soviets engineered to bring down the United States: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. Demoralization was the first and most critical step, and it involved infiltrating the institutions upon which our society was built.
Although the Soviet Union is long gone, demoralization is still occurring in the United States, but it’s coming from within, especially from our academic institutions. I know this firsthand because I almost became another demoralized, nihilistic American youth until I learned to turn my left-leaning college experience to my benefit.
I attended the University of Colorado Boulder—in a place so far ideologically left that Coloradans jokingly refer to the town as “The People’s Republic of Boulder.” On the surface, it looked like a typical college campus with sororities, fraternities, and students busily rushing around campus trying to get to their destinations. Students had that adventurous attitude that comes with being away from home for the first time.
However, I was able to quickly pick up on the subliminal messaging in my introductory classes intended to push students toward the left. And the messaging became increasingly more blatant and extreme as my undergraduate career progressed.
For example, my Sociology 101 professor delivered his lectures as if he were matter-of-factly lecturing on various theories, thinkers, and ideas of the field, but he skillfully and ever so cunningly was steering 400 students to think as Marx did.
I specifically remember how he got almost the entire class to agree with his proposition that employees and employers are inherently in conflict with each other because while one group is interested in trying to increase its compensation, the other is actively attempting to lower it. Of course, there was absolutely no mention of thinkers such as Thomas Sowell who thoroughly debunked that Marxist viewpoint.
What was most alarming to me as a 19-year-old college student was just how unthinkingly my peers accepted the professor’s argumentation without much, if any, challenge.
By the time I became a senior in college, I witnessed a professor declare to the class his allegiance to Foucauldian ideology (i.e., an oppressor versus oppressed worldview expressed by power dynamics) by stating, “I’m a Michel Foucault fanboy.” When this professor suggested that being white automatically made a person a racist, my classmates simply nodded their heads, accepting such nonsensical statements as truth.
What solidified all this indoctrination in such young impressionable minds was when my fellow students were generously rewarded with high scores for their repetition and slow acceptance of the leftist worldview. This is how the process of demoralizing thousands of young people at just one of the many “places of higher learning” throughout our nation takes place.
With the nonstop bombardment of woke messaging coming at college students, how can they possibly hope to maintain the will to keep pursuing their degrees, let alone keep their sanity?
The answer lies within a human being’s power of interpretation. According to the ancient stoics, the only things in the world that we have total control over are our own actions, our reactions to outside stimuli, and the way we interpret our experiences. This wisdom is directly applicable to—and necessary for—the survival and thriving of an open-minded college student.
Although I had a choice to view my college experience as a dreadful slog through the thick mire of extreme leftist ideology with its divisive messaging, I decided to treat this experience as an opportunity to learn as much as I could about what makes people so possessed with such a negative worldview. In other words, I treated my college years as an observational research project.
I attended each class with this mindset, and, in a very short time, I was able to make my classes significantly more interesting—all because of how I chose to think about them.
This is what my advice is to students sitting in a classroom right now, trying to keep their eyes open because they’re so bored of being on the receiving end of incessant propaganda: Remain critically engaged without becoming sentimental about well-crafted messaging directed to arouse feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Also, view your experience as an opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the process of demoralization works in practice.
For those who reject this extreme ideology because of its destructive nature that divides people into “us versus them” categories, treat this as an opportunity to learn about how and what your ideological opponents think and what their plans for the future are.
In other words, do what the ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu would do: The more you look at it from their perspective, the more you are preparing yourself to effectively counter your opposition—and the better you are preparing yourself to win on the ideological battlefield.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/29/how-i-turned-my-left-leaning-college-experience-to-my-benefit
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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2 December, 2022
Ceasefire! School board members call a truce after a year of equity battles
After a year of fighting over equity policies following the election of four conservatives, the school board of an affluent Denver suburb is calling for unity.
CASTLE ROCK, Colo. – After a tumultuous year fraught with fights over equity, recall efforts, lawsuits and the contentious firing of the superintendent, a Denver suburb’s school board has made a push for unity for the sake of the community.
"I'm pleased the board has been able to come together on many important issues that are key and central for our students," Susan Meek, a director on the Douglas County Board of Education, told Fox News. "It's our job as board members to do everything possible to bring our community together."
Four conservative directors were elected in 2021 after running on platforms opposing the district’s newly imposed equity policy and its COVID-19 policies. But the board has encountered controversy after controversy since then.
"If you had to summarize why I ran in one little soundbite, it would be restoring parent role and voice in education," said Mike Peterson, the school board president and one of the conservatives elected last year. "Whatever we can do to make parents feel respected, heard and put them back in partnership with our teachers who also need to be respected and heard, I think it will be good for the district."
One thousand teachers walked out after the conservative members successfully voted to fire the superintendent, which came after the four had discussions behind closed doors. A judge, as a result, put an injunction against the four conservatives and required them to follow Colorado’s open meeting laws.
A recall effort was also launched.
"Our students deserve to be in a district where the community comes together regardless of the political affiliations," Meek told Fox News. "And unfortunately, that's something that our district has struggled with in the past decade or so, and partisan politics kind of seeping into the board elections."
Still, both Meek and Peterson both emphasized their commitment to moving forward and working together, though the two noted that split votes were ongoing.
"We have the humility to learn from the past, whether that's how certain things were done or to constantly evolve and reconsider what we can do better," Peterson said. "I think that's going to be the key to our success."
Earlier this year, the board came together to send two items to the November ballot: a $450 million bond to build, maintain and expand schools and a $60 million mill levy override — effectively a property tax increase — to give staff a raise. Though both measures failed, all seven campaigned for the initiatives.
"We've been able to find common ground on the board, and that's what we've been trying to emphasize," Peterson told Fox News. He said having a more normal school year after facing strict COVID-19 protocols has been particularly helpful.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ceasefire-school-board-members-call-truce-year-equity-battles
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University of California strike is massive example of how Golden State problems are warning to rest of nation
Once again, California is showing us the future — and it’s wracked with labor strife, high prices, government bloat and abject failure. And nowhere is this more apparent than in California’s government education system.
Some 48,000 unionized graduate student workers at 10 University of California campuses went on strike three weeks ago, demanding "significantly higher wages, expanded childcare subsidies, enhanced health coverage and other benefits," according to a CalMatters report.
Meanwhile, government elementary schools in the lockdown-happy state dominated by teachers unions saw math and reading test scores plummet.
These problems connect to the larger left-wing project across the nation, portending failure elsewhere.
In the 1970s, America saw a huge uptick in union strikes as double-digit inflation under President Jimmy Carter eroded wages. The higher wages won by unions in turn fed into more inflation since productivity gains didn’t cover the increase in pay. It was a vicious cycle that pushed some manufacturing to foreign lands.
California is seeing the same phenomenon, leading the nation with the largest strike this year due, in part, to it being America’s third-most-expensive state in which to live. It trails only Hawaii and Massachusetts, with prices for basic necessities like rent, gasoline, electricity and food averaging some 39% higher than the national average.
With inflation at 40-year highs, people are finding it harder to makes ends meet. As a result, labor strikes, like the one in the University of California system, will become more widespread.
The vaunted UC system employs 48,000 unionized students to teach, grade papers, and conduct research. That might make some wonder what it is exactly that tenured professors do all day other than dream up new woke nightmares to visit upon the nation in coming years. As underemployed as professors might be, university administrators are far less productive.
By 2014, administrators at UC campuses outnumbered faculty, having grown by 60% over a decade during which student enrollment increased by 22% and the number of faculty went up by 8%. A study at UC Berkeley found 11 layers of management with 471 managers in charge of just one person. The number of direct reports per supervisor in the private sector ranges from six to 11. There’s a good chance a few of those 471 managers are Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) chiefs with a social media assistant.
Is it any wonder that inflation-adjusted tuition at state-run universities almost tripled from 2000 to 2020?
This administrative bloat has been fed by virtually limitless federal student loans with almost 43 million borrowers now owing more than $1.7 trillion. According to Andrew Gillen, Ph.D., a senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the average student graduating with a bachelor’s degree carries almost $24,000 in debt.
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Regulator downgrades hundreds of outstanding schools in England
Most of the outstanding schools in England inspected last year have been downgraded, according to a report from the schools watchdog.
Some of them had not been looked at for 15 years and many would have experienced "significant change" such as new head teachers, Ofsted said.
But the National Education Union (NEU) said Ofsted's findings were "frequently unreliable".
The Department for Education said most schools remained good or outstanding.
Between 2012 and 2020, schools judged outstanding were revisited only if specific concerns were raised.
Ofsted said 80% of outstanding schools it had revisited last year had been downgraded - 308 primary and secondary schools.
Most were bumped down to good - but 17% were told they needed improvement and 4% were inadequate.
Are you affected by issues covered in this story? Get in touch.
David, a father from Middlesex who asked the BBC to use his first name only, said his son's secondary school was among those that had been downgraded.
He said the school was marked down for "trivial" things, such as selling Design and Technology equipment because of a lack of uptake in the subject - whereas academic attainment remained strong.
It made him question whether Ofsted's grading methods were "fit for purpose".
But Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman said regular inspection gave parents "confidence in the quality of their child's school".
Ofsted said it had prioritised schools that had gone the longest without inspection, when it had been deciding which schools to look at last year.
On average, the schools it visited had not been inspected for 13 years - but some had gone as long as 15 without an inspection.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Ms Spielman said: "These are the schools that have gone longest without being inspected, so are probably slightly more likely not to remain outstanding."
She said it was important for parents to understand that most of the schools have remained "good", but said it was "concerning that quite a significant number have been marked as needing improvement".
There was no target for the number of outstanding schools, she said.
Asked later by MPs whether there had been too many outstanding ratings previously, Ms Spielman said: "The numbers had got very high, uncomfortably high." And the old system of inspections "perhaps looked more to process than substance
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-63713880?at_medium=RSS&
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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1 December, 2022
The Finnish example
In considering the article below, some caution is needed. One should, for instance, not mistake the initial results from a policy change for the final effects. Finland was for some time a world leader in education results on the PISA criteria but it has slipped back to sixth place recently
There are also ways in which Finns are different. Psychologically, they are famously taciturn for intstance. That may help Finns to minimize conflict
Sociologically, all Finns are clearly aware of their heroic struggles with the Soviets. That clearly fosters a sense of brotherhood among them -- something very conducive to acceptance of socialist policies
So what works well in Finland might not transfer well to other societies
The leader of the nation ranked as the happiest in the world arrives in Australia on Thursday, and it presents a great opportunity.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will meet his Finnish counterpart, Sanna Marin, on Friday and will surely be interested to learn more about Finland’s success and how it might apply to Australia.
Finland has led moves towards emphasising wellbeing in economic decisions, of the kind that Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has commenced since Labor took office in May.
Finland is famous for its well-resourced schooling and equality in education funding. This contrasts with the considerable inequalities that remain in Australian school funding almost a decade after the Gonski review’s call for change. Those recommendations lie dormant.
Finnish experience shows that equality between schools – a mutual striving for all schools to be good schools – is the best way to lift a nation’s educational excellence. That collective striving relies on valuing, trusting and fairly rewarding the teachers in those schools.
People will obviously be happier if allowed to pursue what they really want to do with their lives, rather than be pushed into an occupation their parents or others deem to be of suitable status. Encouraging those who choose different vocational paths from a professional career, for instance, contributes to Finland’s happiness. Being in a trade such as a plumber, electrician or carpenter is more valued than here.
Students in Finland are encouraged to follow their natural curiosity. We learn most effectively through trial and error. In Australia, there is too great a requirement for competitive high-stakes testing. This leads to the recitation of pre-prepared “right answers”. It causes anxiety for young people, but it also fails to foster creativity and innovation.
Finland has a remarkable history of innovation, due in part to its strong investment in research and development, which has helped it establish niches of design and production excellence for export. The best-known example is the Nokia company, which dominated global mobile phone production for more than a decade. Australia can learn from this approach to rectify our own underinvestment.
Gender equality is also advanced in Finland. Prime Minister Marin has spearheaded initiatives to increase paternity leave. Last year, paid parental leave in Finland was extended to 14 months, of which almost seven months is allocated for fathers. While some of that paternity leave can be transferred to mothers, most has to be taken by fathers for the family to gain the full entitlement. This “use it or lose it” minimum requirement is the only proven way to lift men’s role in caring for their children.
The new Australian government has made a welcome decision to extend paid parental leave to six months. However, it still needs to demonstrate how fathers will be encouraged to actually take that leave. That will support more mothers to return full-time to the workforce. The proportion of women in full-time jobs in Australia is 20 percentage points below Finland.
Finland is also the least corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International. It stands at equal No. 1 on that index, alongside Denmark and Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand, who Sanna Marin met on Wednesday. Australia languishes at No. 18, underlining the need for the National Anti-Corruption Commission being legislated in our federal parliament this week.
Finland has consistently pursued social democratic policies, the kind that Australia needs to revive if it is to boost its happiness, educational achievement and gender equality. Marin’s visit should provoke us to ponder the question: Do we want to become even more like America, or be more like Finland? We are poised between those two poles on so many indicators.
Measurements have shown, for instance, that an American with tertiary-educated parents is almost seven times more likely to enter tertiary education than a fellow citizen whose parents had no post-school education. In England, the difference is six times and in Australia, it is four times. In Finland, however, you are almost no more likely to get a tertiary education simply because your parents did. Finland has thus created extraordinary intergenerational opportunities for people from less privileged family backgrounds, based on genuine merit.
Australia can learn from this to further realise the full talents of our people to achieve what they want according to their interests and abilities. Our success, indeed our happiness, need not be determined by inherited advantage.
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Stanford is investigating its OWN president - a 'world leader in the study of brain development' - over allegations papers he co-authored contain multiple photoshopped images and manipulated data
Stanford's president in under investigation over allegations papers he co-authored contain doctored data and images.
The school announced the probe Tuesday and said it would be investigating allegations of scientific misconduct involving the university's head staffer, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
The declaration came after posts on an online forum challenged the authenticity of multiple images published in papers coauthored by the Tessier-Lavigne, who assumed the position of president in 2016.
The postings were then reported by the Stanford Daily, the university newspaper, on Tuesday - along with several other allegations of suspected manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne's work.
Tessier-Lavigne, described by Stanford as a 'world leader in the study of brain development and repair,' has had a lucrative tenure at the school, adding $12.1billion to its endowment and reversing an unpopular plan to nix its 11 sports teams.
After the allegations were aired, prominent science research publisher the European Microbiology Organization Journal said it would also be investigating the staffer, saying it was 'looking into' discrepancies in a research paper he penned in 2018.
The papers in question were also funded by taxpayers in the form of government grants, raising serious questions about the staffer's integrity.
A prominent biologist familiar with Tessier-Lavigne's work has since come out to say that several scientific papers written by the president contained 'a lot of visible errors,' and content 'suggestive (of) an intention to mislead.'
Elisabeth Bik, a nationally recognized expert in image analysis and research integrity, told the East Bay Times upon analyzing the paper that 'one cannot really say that all the problems that we found are pointing towards misconduct.'
She added: 'But there definitely are some problems - and they're real,'
Experts who reviewed Tessier-Lavigne's research at the request of The Daily agreed with Bik's analysis, pointed out that three papers in prominent research journals Science and Nature also contained 'serious problems.'
Scientific misconduct researchers who reviewed the papers, The Daily claimed, contained images that had been 'photoshopped,' as well as manipulated data.
On Tuesday evening in a statement, Tessier-Lavigne said he welcomed the review and would cooperate with school officials.
'Scientific integrity is of the utmost importance both to the university and to me personally,' he said. 'I support this process and will fully cooperate with it, and I appreciate the oversight by the Board of Trustees.'
Initially, a Stanford spokesperson, rebuffed the school paper's story, asserting Tessier-Lavigne 'was not involved in any way in the generation or presentation of the panels that have been queried' in two of the aforementioned four papers.
Speaking to The Daily, spokesperson Dee Mostofi said that the issues present in the other two 'do not affect the data, results or interpretation of the papers.'
Bik told the Daily Tuesday that she did 'not agree with (the) statement that these issues have no bearing on the data or the results.'
Later that evening, the school appeared to walk back those claims, announcing that they would in fact open an investigation into the staffer, joining the European Microbiology Organization Journal in doing so.
One of the pieces under scrutiny was published in the journal, while the other three were found in 'Science' and 'Nature.' Two of those papers featured Tessier-Lavigne as the lead author.
Allegations of scientific misconduct regarding those papers repeatedly appeared on the online forum PubPeer, where users critique the contents of respected science journals over the last seven years, the Daily’s investigation found.
Stanford University spokespeople did not immediately respond to a DailyMail.com request for comment Thursday.
Tessier-Lavigne, a native of Ontario, Canada, spent his early career researching degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s before transitioning to more administrative roles
Prior of his tenure at Stanford, he served as the president of Rockefeller University in New York City.
The contested research was conducted prior to his 2016 recruitment from New York to Stanford, with most centered on the study of the development of neural connections in the brain.
It was not immediately clear how long the investigations into Tessier-Lavigne would take. Both are currently underway.
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Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School?
Social justice joins discounted cash flows on the syllabus as essential knowledge for aspiring corporate leaders
At Harvard Business School, inside a seminar room with a smattering of button-down shirts and puffy fall jackets, a group of future corporate managers were talking about capitalism. What makes capitalism truly and purely capitalism? What are its essential components? Property rights. Financial markets.
“Maybe this is almost so foundational that it’s too much to put on the board — but scarcity?” said Andrew Gibbs, 32, a second-year student who came to Harvard by way of the military. “Would it be capitalism if people were comfortable?”
Prof. Debora Spar, who teaches the widely sought-after course “Capitalism and the State,” turned to Mr. Gibbs with the eye glimmer of an instructor who knows the conversation is about to get heated. “Would you go so far as to say a necessary condition for capitalism is scarcity, which is going to drive inequality?”
Mr. Gibbs paused, contemplating. “I would say so.”
On the blackboard it went: Capitalism. Scarcity. Inequality.
Every year, some 250,000 young people step off the treadmill of their jobs, many in consulting and private equity, to chase skills and credentials that will turbocharge their future roles in consulting and private equity — by going to business school. They study accounting and negotiation. They learn about D.C.F.s (discounted cash flows) and the three C’s (company, customers and competitors). They emerge with the ability to at least feign intimate knowledge of the godfather of shareholder primacy, referred to in one classroom as “our buddy Milton Friedman.”
But today’s business school students are also learning about corporate social obligations and how to rethink capitalism, a curriculum shift at elite institutions that reflects a change in corporate culture as a whole. Political leaders on the left and right are calling for business leaders to reconsider their societal responsibilities. On the left, they argue that business needs to play some role in confronting daunting global threats — a warming planet, fragile democracy. On the right, they chastise executives for distracting from profits by talking politics.
The corporate phenomenon of socially responsible investing, or E.S.G., has become a point of contention — as well as a $40 trillion industry. Elon Musk called it a “scam” after the S&P 500 removed Tesla from its Environmental, Social and Governance index last spring. Mike Pence, the former vice president, recently urged states to “rein in” E.S.G. BlackRock issued a letter in September trying to stave off critics by noting, essentially, that the investment firm’s focus on the environment wasn’t detracting from its core purpose: making money.
Meanwhile, many workers have spent recent years demanding that their employers take a more decisive stance on social issues like racial injustice and abortion.
Top-ranked business schools are stepping into the political arena. Harvard started its Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society last month. Nearly half of the Yale School of Management’s core curriculum is devoted to E.S.G. Next fall, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will start offering M.B.A. majors in diversity, equity and inclusion and in environmental, social and governance factors for business.
What happens at Harvard, Wharton and other elite campuses offers a small glimpse of the changes in the corporate realm. But at the same time, their graduates tend to have outsize influence on business, shaping the values and policies of the companies they may one day run.
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Business schools are not generally known for their radicalism, but their students and faculty are grappling, sometimes ambivalently, with fast-changing expectations of business’s role in society. Most students are frank about the prestigious jobs they want, with hefty salaries attached. Now, though, they’re facing sharper questions from classmates about how to balance their ambitions with some sense of responsibility to the public good.
“We’re at Harvard Business School — it’s a bastion of capitalism,” said Ethan Rouen, who teaches the Harvard class “Reimagining Capitalism.” “I will say, though, that if you look at the courses being offered, the institutes being created and speakers we bring on campus, there is a huge demand both from the faculty and the students for rethinking the obligation of the corporation to society.”
Inside classrooms, the range of views on corporate political engagement has broadened in recent years, according to people across leading business schools. Assumptions long woven into the syllabus are open for questioning: the wisdom of maximizing profits, the idea that America’s version of capitalism is functioning properly.
“There’s a conscious shift happening with professors wanting us to question: Is profit the only thing corporations should care about? How should businesses use their influence?” said Chinedum Egbosimba, 27, who studied engineering and then worked at Bain & Company before winding up at Harvard Business School and in Ms. Spar’s class.
“The classic school of thinking that businesses should only make money is very much alive,” he continued. “But many of my classmates look at the world we have today and say, ‘Yeah, there’s clearly some things about this system we need to fix.’”
At Harvard, in “Capitalism and the State,” colloquially known as CATS, Ms. Spar asked her students to flip their name cards sideways if they felt globalization was ultimately a good system. She paced excitedly, cheetah-print shoes roving the classroom floor.
After some mumbling and paper shuffling, about 80 percent of the students flipped their placards, signaling a thumbs-up on globalization. Mr. Egbosimba disagreed. Leaning forward in his back-row seat, he asked his classmates to rethink the view that had given rise to the world as they knew it — the International Monetary Fund, Hyatt hotels around the world and McDonald’s golden arches at every airport.
“I’m from the global south, the old colonies of the West,” said Mr. Egbosimba, who grew up in Nigeria. “Maybe there’s some version of this idea that could have led to acceptance and peace, but it’s not the one we built. As a victim of it, I can say that with confidence.”
His classmate Alan Xie, 28, piped up in agreement. “The distrust of elites connected to capitalism undermines the whole globalization project,” he said. “We’ve actually imported illiberalism as a result of having nice stuff.”
Still, most of their classmates remained in favor of a globalized economy. Ms. Spar summed up their arguments succinctly: “We’ve got growth. We’ve got nice stuff,” she said. “It worked.”
To which Rachel Orol, 29, seated in the front row, replied: “It worked for us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/business/business-school-social-justice.html
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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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