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31 May, 2023
Leftism is fundamentally incompatible with what universities do
So it is a considerable tragedy that universities are a great bastion of Leftism
The besetting fault of Leftists is that they propose solutions to problems without first making much effort to understand the problem. Their ego makes them sure that they know it all without effort. Sadly, their ignorant solutions often make the problem worse
I have just come across a classic example of that. It appeared in the glossy magazine put out by my alma mater, the University of Queensland -- and was written by a UQ academic. For details, see:
https://stories.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/2023/australias-housing-crisis-is-deepening/index.html
To understand how brain-dead the article is you need only to know that there is a great shortage of rental accomodation in many advanced countries -- including Australia and the UK. Many people are not in a position to own their own homes so rely on what they can rent. And all governments -- including Soviet-style ones -- are very poor at providing housing. Even welfare housing is usually only a small fraction of the available rental housing
So in Australia, the UK, and elsewhere, it falls on private landlords to provide most of the rentals. But at the moment there are just not enough rentals to go around. People end up living in their cars and in the streets. And some groups cram six people into an apartment built for two.
So amid such a dire shortage of rental housing, you would think that governments would be going all-out to encourage more people to go landlording, would you not? But that is logical -- too logical for short-sighted Leftists. Instead, they are doing their level best to DISCOURAGE private landlording.
They seem to think that they can give tenants more rights without reducing the rights of landlords. But that is in fact a zero-sum game. A right for a tenant is a restriction on rights for a landlord.
A good example: Mandating that tenants must be allowed to keep a pet restricts landlords from forbidding pets. And landlords do usually want to forbid pets -- for good reasons. When a pet-owning tenant moves out, the piss and shit that has fallen on the landlord's carpet makes the carpet so stinky that the property is unlettable to new tenants. So the landlord has to spend thousands replacing the carpet. As a former landlord, I have been there and done that.
And making it compulsory for landlords to allow pets has actually been done where I live.
So the first two things listed as needing to be done for tenants in the UQ magazine are solidly aimed at advantaging tenants -- without the slightest evidence of thought about how landlords might respond to that. Real estate agents have already warned that new rights being contemplated will cause owners to withdraw their properties from the rental market. So the reforms that would supposedly "help" tenants are likely to leave more of them on the streets
Apartments and houses are being sold for very high prices at the moment so it will be very tempting for landlords to sell up. One despairs for our universities. Deep thought has become alien to them
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‘Alarmist’ climate change teaching leaves pupils fearing for their future
More than half of teenagers think the world will likely end in their lifetime because of climate change, as parents warn of the dangers of “alarmist” teaching in schools.
Climate change education in schools is feeding anxiety among children and putting them off having families of their own, research has suggested.
A poll carried out of more than 1,000 sixth-form pupils in March found that 53 per cent believe it is “likely” that the world will end in their lifetime because of climate change.
It showed that 26 per cent of teenagers who ever feel anxious or sad say climate change has made their anxiety or sadness worse.
Half of 16- to 18-year-olds said people should have fewer children to stop “overpopulation and climate change”, according to the report published by the Civitas think tank.
Academics have warned that “eco-anxiety”, or a feeling of acute fear over the planet’s future, is on the rise among children and teenagers.
Dr Alex Standish, an associate professor of geography education at University College London, said that instead of reflecting “catastrophising narratives” around climate change, schools need to “provide children with perspective on global warming and offer them positive ways forwards”.
Climate change in the national curriculum in England is currently directly referenced in secondary school subjects, including science and geography. However, research has shown that most teachers across primaries and secondaries are teaching and talking to their pupils about the topic.
A survey of more than 600 primary and secondary teachers in England in 2021 found that teachers in England support an “action-based” climate change curriculum, including issues of “global social justice, beginning in primary school with mitigation projects such as conservation, local tree-planting and family advocacy”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/20/climate-change-alarmist-teaching-school-children-fears/
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‘I'm suing after my kid was given a chest binder and gender-affirming therapy’
When Amber Lavigne found a chest binder (an undergarment used to flatten breast tissue) in her 13-year-old’s room, the mum was upset.
Her child, who identifies as a boy, had been seeing a new social worker called Roy at school, and without Amber’s knowledge, she alleges that Roy gave the teen gender-affirming counselling and provided the undergarment.
Amber’s family lives in Maine, where school policy excludes parents from gender affirming counselling because of the risk that some parents may react negatively to or try to stop their child’s transition, according to reporting by the New York Post and the Maine Wire.
On Tuesday the US mum has filed a lawsuit against the school board.
“Lavigne has never given [the school] cause to believe that [the child] will be harmed in any way by [Lavigne’s] knowledge of [gender-affirming counselling], nor is there any basis for such a belief. Consequently there is no rational basis for the school withholding and concealing such information,” the filing states.
But shortly after the mum complained about the counselling, a welfare agent from Maine’s Office of Child and Family Services visited the Lavigne home after an anonymous tip about alleged abuse. Amber said she believed the visit came because she spoke out against the school.
Amber was aware that in Year 7, a school social worker had been talking to the teen about mental health issues and questions of gender identity, but when she spoke to the counsellor, Amber said she understood that the issues had resolved themselves.
In Year 8 though, the teen began seeing Roy, a new social worker, without Amber’s knowledge. The mum wasn’t aware that the gender transitioning discussions had continued in secret until she found the chest binder.
Amber was furious about the secrecy and said it violated her rights.
“When school officials found out, they defended the counsellor’s actions, trampling on my constitutional rights at every turn,” the mum said in a statement released by her legal team at the Goldwater Institute.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly held, over the last century, that parents have a fundament right to control and direct the education, upbringing and healthcare decisions of their children,” lead lawyer Adam Shelton added.
“But parents cannot meaningfully exercise this right if public schools hide vital information about their children from them.”
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A Symptom of Urban Crime’s Toll on College Students
In recent years, there has been a surge in violent crime in our nation’s capital, and unfortunately, our college students have not been spared. This issue has become symptomatic of a larger problem that plagues urban cities across the nation, where college students are being robbed and carjacked, all at gunpoint. As these young adults work to educate themselves and become productive citizens, they are faced with a harrowing reality: Crime can find them even in the hallowed halls of academia. Washington, D.C., the city that represents our nation’s values and aspirations, has become a chilling example of the challenges these students face.
As parents send their children off to college, they envision a sanctuary of learning, growth and self-discovery. They do not expect their sons and daughters to be held at gunpoint while walking to class or to the library. Yet, that is the disheartening truth for far too many students in urban environments. Washington, D.C., home to several prestigious universities, has seen an alarming uptick in violent crime targeting college students.
In neighborhoods adjacent to some of our most esteemed institutions, such as Howard University, Georgetown University and American University, students are faced with a constant barrage of news stories about classmates being robbed, assaulted or even killed. This unrelenting assault on their sense of security and well-being has forced these young adults to adapt to a new reality — one where they are always on high alert, not just in their quest for knowledge but also for their personal safety.
The reasons for this surge in violent crime are multifaceted, ranging from poverty to drug addiction to the breakdown of the family structure. As a nation, we must confront these issues head-on to help create a safer environment for our students, and ultimately, for all of our citizens.
We cannot continue to ignore the impact of poverty on crime rates. For generations, the lack of resources and opportunities in underserved urban communities has led to a sense of despair and hopelessness. This desperation can drive young people to make regrettable choices, including resorting to crime as a means of survival.
By investing in education, job training and community development initiatives, we can provide a pathway out of poverty and give these individuals a reason to believe in a brighter future.
Another contributing factor to the high crime rates in our urban centers is drug addiction. The scourge of drugs, particularly opioids, has ravaged communities across the country. This epidemic has torn families apart and created a breeding ground for crime. A comprehensive approach to addressing the opioid crisis, including accessible addiction treatment services and support for those in recovery, is essential in our fight against urban crime.
In many of these communities, the breakdown of the family structure has been a significant contributor to the rise in crime. With an increase in single-parent households and the absence of positive role models, young people are often left to navigate the challenges of life without proper guidance. This void in their lives can make them susceptible to the influences of gang culture and criminal activity. By promoting strong families and providing mentorship programs, we can help our youth resist these dangerous temptations.
While we work to address these complex issues, we must also recognize the importance of supporting our law enforcement agencies. The men and women in blue risk their lives every day to keep our communities safe, and they need the proper resources and support to do their jobs effectively. The current trend of demonizing the police and advocating for defunding their budgets is counterproductive and detrimental to the safety of our college students and urban communities.
We need leaders who not only understand the gravity of the situation but are also willing to take bold and decisive actions to protect our most vulnerable citizens. This is not a time for complacency or empty promises. We need representatives who prioritize public safety above all else and are committed to allocating the necessary resources to combat crime effectively.
One crucial aspect of this is increasing police presence in high-risk areas. We cannot ignore the fact that a visible and proactive law enforcement presence is vital in deterring criminals and ensuring the safety of our communities. By supporting initiatives that bolster police presence and provide them with the tools they need, we send a strong message to criminals that their actions will not go unpunished.
We cannot stop at simply electing officials who promise change. We must hold them accountable for their actions. Transparency, effectiveness and proactive policing are nonnegotiable. Our elected officials must be transparent in their decision-making processes, ensuring that the public is well informed and involved. We need them to implement strategies that have been proven to work, continuously evaluate their effectiveness and make adjustments as needed.
To achieve this, we must actively participate in the democratic process. We must engage with our elected officials, express our concerns and demand action. By raising our voices, we can create a groundswell of support for the safety and well-being of our college students and urban communities. Together, we can work toward a future where education thrives, where the halls of academia remain sanctuaries of learning and growth, free from the grip of violent crime.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/97582
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30 May, 2023
Outraged critics rip CUNY law grad’s ‘hate-filled’ commencement speech, demand billions in tax dollars be stripped
Muslim hate again
Outraged critics are demanding CUNY’s billions of dollars in taxpayer funding be stripped away after a law grad delivered a “hate-filled and dangerous’’ commencement address ripping NYPD “fascists” and Israel.
In her vitriolic May 12 graduation speech at the public City University of New York’s law school, newly minted grad Fatima Mousa Mohammed called for a “revolution” to take on the legal system’s “white supremacy’’ while blasting city cops and the US military and claiming Israel carries out “indiscriminate” murder.
“This hate-filled and dangerous speech has been brought to you by @CUNY and paid for by New York taxpayers,” tweeted Simcha Eichenstein, a Democratic state assemblyman representing Brooklyn. “Keep this in mind next time our elected leaders highlight their commitment to fighting antisemitism.”
Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) said, “Imagine being so crazed by hatred for Israel as a Jewish State that you make it the subject of your commencement speech at a law school graduation.
“Anti-Israel derangement syndrome at work.”
During her speech, Mohammed accused the school of having “self-serving interests” and said it “continues to fail us,” continues to “train and cooperate with the fascist NYPD, the military” and continues “to train [Israeli] soldiers to carry out that violence globally.”
She also called the US legal system “a manifestation of white supremacy that continues to oppress and suppress people in this nation and around the world.”
She urged her classmates to continue the “revolution” to effect change, using their rage as “the fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism and Zionism around the world.”
Mohammed was selected by the graduating class of 2023 to speak during their graduation ceremony.
Barry Grodenchik, a former Democratic city councilman, agreed with Rep. Torres’s assessment of Mohammed’s speech, writing “@RitchieTorres is spot on here. “This hater can spout her hate where she pleases but it should not be at the publicly funded @CUNY school of law.
“Her antisemitism destroyed this commencement and it must be roundly condemned and should not have been sanctioned with public funds.”
Councilman Ari Kagan — who recently left the Democratic party and became a Republican — called the address a “vile anti-American & anti-Israel speech promoting hate.
“Totally unacceptable graduation speech for taxpayers funded institution. @CUNY & @CUNY Law should immediately condemn this hateful speech & take all steps necessary to address such dangerous rhetoric!” he wrote in a tweet.
CUNY’s 2023 budget amounted to about $4.3billion, according to the office of city Comptroller Brad Lander. Most of that funding comes from the state through its annual budget, although more than $600 million came from the city.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/29/cuny-critics-outraged-by-hate-filled-grad-speech-yank-tax-dollars/
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University Facing Massive Backlash After Video from 'Black-Only Graduation' Goes Viral
The University of California Berkeley has found itself at the center of accusations that it has set Civil Rights back 60 years after hosting a black-only graduation service this month.
The school had announced in March that it was planning the segregated, black-only graduation event for this month which was “open to all majors,” but not to all races.
“The Department of African American Studies plans on hosting our annual Black Graduation ceremony, which is open to all majors and degree programs across the campus,” the school’s announcement read.
The ceremony was held last Saturday, on May 20 at Zellerbach Hall.
On the livestreamed video for the event, a description read, “Black Graduation is an annual, campus-wide ceremony that celebrates all Black/African/African American identifying students upon completion of their undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D., J.D., and/or professional degree programs.”
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Why Seattle schools are more segregated today than the 1980s
In 1978, Seattle became the nation’s first major city to voluntarily integrate schools. Today, it’s hard to tell it ever happened.
As the city’s population grows more diverse, children attend schools markedly more racially isolated than those their parents attended. Black students are just as segregated now as they were during the Nixon administration. The number of schools where white students are in the majority has nearly doubled since the 1990s, even as white student enrollment has declined.
These conditions are important drivers of educational inequity — one of the reasons integration was practiced here for 40 years. Integration has been linked to increases in achievement for Black and Latino students, and helping students challenge racial bias. But schools are still largely a product of where kids live, and where they live is often a vestige of racist housing laws, generational wealth and government neglect. Left unaddressed, these forces seep into classrooms.
In the past decade, the district’s gap in academic outcomes between Black and white students grew to one of the widest in the country. Parent groups at one school can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars while another campus just a few miles away has no parent-teacher organization. Schools in wealthier, whiter areas tend to employ teachers who have more experience. And the advanced learning program at one school became so segregated the former superintendent heard it was called “Apartheid High.”
There is no shortage of people interested in fixing this stratification. It has been the central charge of countless school district leaders, nonprofits, students, parents, teachers and consultants. Taxpayers and philanthropists have collectively given billions toward a district that promises to unapologetically serve students “furthest from educational justice,” with an emphasis on Black boys.
But within this ecosystem, very few bring up integration as a solution anymore. This idea, initially aimed at reforming segregated schools in the American South, once had the backing of Seattle civil rights organizations. For decades, the district sent thousands of kids on buses to far-off neighborhoods in the name of resolving the same problems Seattle schools face today.
The end of Seattle’s formal integration efforts came after white parents sued over the district’s policy. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the parents’ favor in 2007.
District leaders have no plans to revive a program today; there isn’t a large public effort calling for one, either. For many racial justice advocates, gentrification has become a bigger foe. In the past 30 years, the district’s Black student population declined by a third.
“While we can’t reverse the impacts of the past, we can understand those impacts, and nurture and teach our students at every school,” said Brent Jones, Seattle schools superintendent, who is Black and was a student during the heyday of Seattle’s integration efforts. “Families have told us that serving students close to home is a community value and important.”
Each generation, including this one, has made its own attempts to lessen the pervasive consequences of segregation. Some are individual actions and some are major structural changes. None are as seismic as what Seattle schools tried nearly a half-century ago.
https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/why-seattle-schools-are-more-segregated-today-than-the-1980s/ ?
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29 May, 2023
School Choice Success for Nebraska - Great for All Students
Just a decade ago, there were only a couple dozen states in the U.S. with school choice programs. This week, Nebraska has made history as the 50th state in the nation to pass a school choice bill — a monumental win for families in the Cornhusker State.
This passage is not only a major victory for the school choice movement in Nebraska; it is also a testament to the advancement of educational freedom and opportunities nationwide for all children, regardless of color, race, or economic status.
Nebraska’s LB753, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, which just passed with a supermajority from the Unicameral Legislature, establishes a tax-credit scholarship that will help more than ten thousand students attend a non-public school of their choice. Scholarships will average around $9,000 per student, depending on the needs of the family and tuition costs.
The Opportunity Scholarships Act will give first priority to students living in poverty, students with exceptional needs, those who experienced bullying, are in the foster system or are in military families, and children denied enrollment into another public school.
With the goal of empowering families, passing school choice in Nebraska was the right thing to do. As a Hispanic education advocate, I am fighting for my community to overcome inequality in education. A high-quality education is one of the only paths to success for children living in poverty.
A quality K-12 education is a path to economic progress and opportunity, preparing students for college and successful careers, and school choice will always be part of the solution since the traditional system of education will never fit all the individual needs of students and families.
While Nebraskans take pride in their public schools, public schools are not always the answer for every child. Students of color will particularly benefit from finally having access to more educational options.
Nowhere is that fact more clear than within the Latino community. However, according to the latest National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, the disparities between racial and socioeconomic subgroups continue to exist, and although they have fluctuated over the years, these disparities are not diminishing.
The achievement gaps in math and reading in Nebraska are wider than the national average, particularly for Hispanic and African American students. This is important as Latino students encompass the fastest-growing student population in the state, and they had an average score that was 24 points lower than that of white students.
Empirical data reflects that many students of color are academically suffering from a public education system that has been failing them for years. But there is reason to hope that these gaps will start closing through school choice. Evidence from other states, especially Florida, suggest that school choice can help close racial achievement gaps.
Families seek school choice for a variety of reasons. According to the 2022 Schooling in America Survey, among the top five priorities of education from parents include academic quality or reputation, safe environment, location, disciplinary policies and class size. Additionally, in my experience working with Latino families, they want to feel supported by their school, have the ability to exit a school due to bullying or more severe cases of violence, and also want to choose a school because it satisfies their views and ideas of what constitutes a decent education.
But test scores don’t always tell the whole story. School choice has already impacted students in Nebraska like Jayleesha Cooper and Brandon Villanueva Sanchez— both outstanding students of color from the Cornhusker State, whose parents did not give up until they were able to provide them with a quality K-12 education. Jayleesha and Brandon attribute their success to school choice and the sacrifices their parents made for their education.
Stories like these are perpetual in my community. Educational choice empowers underprivileged families to close achievement disparities and beat the odds of poverty. School choice gives access to the promise of the American Dream.
I understand the struggle that my community endures. As a first-generation Chilean-American, I grew up in the traditional public school system, overwhelmed by large classrooms and relentless bullying. I came to the United States seeking opportunity, and I knew that opportunity was only possible with a quality education.
The passage of this legislation will give educational opportunities for students who would not have it otherwise. It means legislators are finally listening to the parents and families who only want to give their children the best opportunities at success. It is truly a great day for Nebraska families.
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Biden’s Message to Black College Graduates: You’re Victims, Not Leaders
Terris Todd
I sat in the crowd with thousands of beautiful families waiting to hear a message of inspiration, hope, and a brighter future like I would expect to hear at any commencement speech in America. Instead, sitting in the audience at the historically black Howard University, the graduates, their families, and I heard a message from the president of the United States laced with divisive rhetoric and political narratives that cast a dark shadow over our country.
Such an appalling, politically driven speech will no doubt leave many of the graduates in fear of certain of their fellow Americans and hopeless about the possibilities for their future in this country.
Howard University has been known for many years as a leader in STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, as well as a home to many notable alumni who have impacted our nation and the world.
The National Science Foundation has ranked Howard University as the top producer of African American undergraduates who later go on to earn their science and engineering doctoral degrees.
One would have to wonder why President Joe Biden chose this institution with its reputation for excellence and chose such a happy and historic moment for these graduates to inform them that “the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. I’m not just saying this because I’m at a black HBCU, I say it wherever I go.”
Well, Mr. President, that’s the problem.
Black Americans, like many other groups throughout our nation, understand that politicians for decades have come to their neighborhoods and their events to pander and fearmonger them into the trance of victimhood. These politicians feel compelled to do it even when those whom they are trying to make victims are surrounded by countless examples of triumph and perseverance—like their fellow graduates at Howard’s graduation ceremony.
If we were to ask black Americans what they believe are the greatest threats to their livelihood and their local communities, I can guarantee you they would not say that white supremacy was at the top of their list.
So, let’s move past the political talking points and speeches filled with trigger words that seek to control the emotional state of black Americans. We have heard it all and seen it all.
What we should have heard from the president of the United States was how the graduates who were earning their degrees in business or accounting that day, for example, should help our federal government get a handle on its outrageous debt and its unsustainable spending habits with Americans’ tax dollars.
My colleague, Rachel Greszler, wrote a piece describing how government’s freewheeling federal spending will do real harm to people like these graduates and their future children. She asked, “How could over $230,000 of total government debt per household—debt that must eventually be repaid—not burden younger and future generations?”
Many of the families who attended Howard’s graduation feel the pain of the nation’s current economic crisis firsthand, and dealing with inflation on a daily basis has made it extremely challenging for them to just survive.
Unfortunately, several others in the audience might not understand how the government’s overspending and lack of accountability have caused much of the pain their families feel.
What about a message from the president to the students who were earning their degrees in some form of medicine or health care-related field?
With a community, a nation, and a world suddenly stricken by a pandemic that took the lives of over a million people in the U.S. alone—on top of so many other diseases and conditions already plaguing our nation—it seems more fitting for a president to provide inspiration and encouragement to these students to take the lead on finding the cures to preserve human life.
But of course, the game of politics prevails, even during an event when politics matters the least.
At a time when the president should have inspired and motivated, he attempted to polarize and divide this nation even further. The students and their families deserved much better than the message they got that day.
But I have hope that the students graduating with degrees in medicine, mathematics, the sciences, technology, and other critical fields will be the very people who help to bring Americans together as they use their professions to advance the nation and create a better world for all of us.
Congratulations to the graduates and their families.
I pray that your journey into fulfilling careers and throughout life is one that we can all be very proud of.
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Maine School Board Asks Church What It Believes About Marriage, Abortion, Gender Before Denying Lease
A Maine church that outgrew its meeting space applied with the local school board to lease space at a high school for worship services, but the school board appeared to apply a religious test to the church and negotiations fell through. Now, the church is suing.
“Public institutions that seek to lease their facilities for revenue should not be able to discriminate based on religious or political conviction,” Mariah Gondeiro, vice president and legal counsel of Advocates for Faith & Freedom, the law firm representing the church, said in a press release exclusively provided first to The Daily Signal.
Gondeiro is representing The Pines Church in Bangor, Maine, which sued the Hermon School Committee Tuesday. The Pines Church aimed to move to Hermon, Maine, because many church members live there. Yet Hermon had no rental spaces available, and it appeared that meeting at the high school represented the best option.
According to the complaint, organizations seeking short-term leases must work with the principal of the school and complete a facilities request form—a form that does not include any questions about the organization’s beliefs. Many organizations currently rent Hermon High School space, including Black Bear Basketball, Hermon Recreation, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and various baseball groups. The church had even offered to pay $1,000 per month, $400 over the original price, as a sign that it would invest in the community.
Yet, when the church filed the request form, Superintendent Micah Grant and a member of the Hermon school board asked pointed questions about the church’s positions on “issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Chris McLaughlin, a school board member who includes personal pronouns in his signature, wrote that he “wanted to get a better sense of how The Pines Church approaches issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion and around their messaging around some key issues relevant to marginalized communities.”
He asked, “Is The Pines Church receptive of same-sex marriages? Do they consider marriage only to be between 1 man and 1 woman?”
He also requested information on the church’s positions on “access to safe and affordable abortion,” “access to gender-affirming medical care,” “conversion therapy for LGBTQIA+ individuals (youth and adults),” and “inclusive sexual education and access to birth control for youth.”
The lawsuit states that “the implications of the [board’s] questions are clear; unless [The Pines Church] affirms [Hermon School Department’s] religious and political beliefs, the [board] will not support [the church’s] lease proposal.”
The committee rejected Pastor Matt Gioia’s proposal to lease the high school for either six months or one year because of its religious beliefs on abortion, sexual orientation, “gender reassignment,” “conversion therapy,” and marriage, according to the lawsuit. The committee voted to allow the church to rent school facilities on a month-to-month basis after the pastor had told the committee that a month-to-month lease would not work.
“A month-to-month lease is not feasible for the church because it makes it impossible to plan and budget and allows [the school board] to terminate the lease on short notice, leaving the church with nowhere to go,” the suit explains.
The lawsuit alleges that the school board’s questions reflected “an improper motive on behalf of [the school district] to exclude traditional viewpoints on these issues from use of the school facilities.”
The church claims that the school board’s move “sends the message to houses of worship and other religious entities that organizations that maintain traditional historically orthodox biblical beliefs about human sexuality are second-class institutions, outsiders, and not full members of the Hermon community.”
Conservative Christians who follow the Bible define marriage as between one man and one woman, defend unborn life in the womb, and affirm that God created humans male and female, not transgender. Yet a growing social movement does not just reject these ideas but brands them hateful.
The church claims the school board violated its rights under the First Amendment, under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, and under Maine’s public accommodations laws. The lawsuit asks the court to order the school board to award the church either a six-month or a yearlong lease, along with compensatory damages.
“The Hermon School Committee has a history of leasing their properties to secular organizations without persecution,” Gondeiro, the legal counsel, said. “We are advocating for fair and equitable treatment under the law, and The Pines Church was denied that opportunity by the Hermon School Committee.”
“We are understandably disappointed with the process in which we had to go through, but we are not discouraged,” Gioia said in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal. “We have seen the Lord move through our church and grow our community so much since our founding. We are hopeful that we will be able to continue our worship and fellowship without discrimination.”
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28 May, 2023
Colorado Teachers Continue Flirtation With Communism
What’s happening in Colorado is precisely what the U.S. Supreme Court tried to prevent decades ago.
In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold a New York state law prohibiting communists from teaching in public schools. Dubbed the Feinberg Law — the New York statute banned from the teaching profession anyone who called for the overthrow of the government.
The 6-3 decision, specifically crafted to keep communism out of the classroom, supported the belief that “(T)he state had a constitutional right to protect the immature minds of children in its public schools from subversive propaganda, subtle or otherwise, disseminated by those ‘to whom they look for guidance, authority and leadership.’”
Even then, the New York Teachers Union vowed to fight the law. Decades later, teachers’ unions are still fighting to put communism in the classroom.
During an event earlier this month organized by the Colorado AFL-CIO, the parent organization of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second largest teacher’s union, a Colorado teacher took the stage to call for a “forceful cultural revolution."
Tim Hernandez is a teacher at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website. He announced in his speech at the Colorado AFL-CIO event that he advocates for Marxism-Leninism to be taught in schools, admitting that he teaches radical communist doctrines in his classroom.
The Colorado teacher has published his radical anti-white views on his public social media accounts, calling for white people to “distance themselves from their whiteness.”
Imagine the civil rights uproar if a public school employee with a taxpayer-funded salary called for blacks to “distance themselves from their blackness.”
This wildly racist suggestion would surely have resulted in the teacher being fired and facing legal action for racial discrimination and/or hate speech. But when it’s white students being discriminated against, Hernandez’s actions are not only overlooked but endorsed by teachers’ unions across the country.
The Colorado Education Association (CEA), the largest teachers’ union in the Mountain State, with more than 39,000 members, has gone even further to advocate for communist ideology by passing an anti-capitalism resolution at its 97th annual delegate assembly last month.
The resolution asserts, “(T)he CEA believes that capitalism requires exploitation of children, public schools, land, labor, and/or resources and, therefore, the only way to fully address systemic racism (the school-to-prison pipeline), climate change, patriarchy (gender and LGBTQ disparities), educational inequality, and income inequality is to dismantle capitalism and replace it with a new, equitable economic system.”
The director of communications at CEA, Lauren Stephenson, claimed the resolution “reflect(s) the views of the union’s 39,000 members.”
This radically anti-American ideology is being championed by teacher’s’ unions and written into lesson plans all over the state.
Colorado State Sen. Mark Baisley (R-Roxborough Park) has alerted Colorado Attorney General John Kellner about Hernandez’s public rhetoric, warning “history has shown us how violent this movement can become.”
“This radical teacher’s call for a forceful revolution against the people may very well be a crime,” he said. “And adding a racial motivation may also make this a hate crime.”
Baisley continued, “It’s unconscionable that any school in Colorado, let alone a preparatory Academy, would employ a teacher who uses such a primeval call to arms.”
Hernandez’s contract with the Denver Public School was not renewed after he was placed on administrative leave for helping students organize a walkout, which resulted in police helicopters surrounding the school. Hernandez claims his contract was not renewed because, “(W)hite school leaders did not appreciate the ways (he) advocated for students.”
After being placed on administrative leave by Denver Public Schools for organizing a student walkout that was planned off-campus at the home of an Aurora Public School principal, Hernandez was offered a position at Aurora Public Schools, where the Aurora principal told him, “I’ve already seen everything that you can do. I’ll let you teach whatever you want. You can come to our school. Please help me transform our school.’”
And so he has. Just not in the way the district’s parents would approve of.
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Parents Sue Maryland School Board After Kids Allegedly Forced to Read 'Pride Books'
Last Tuesday, a group of six parents from Maryland took a stand for parental rights and filed a lawsuit against the Montgomery County Board of Education.
These parents, from diverse religious backgrounds including Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity, are pushing back against what they see as an overreach by the school board.
They allege that the board has violated their parental rights by mandating books promoting a one-sided view of transgender ideology and same-sex relationships without prior notification to parents??.
Last fall, the board introduced a list of 13 new books, branded as “LGBTQ-inclusive,” aimed at students from pre-K to eighth grade.
The inclusion of these books in the curriculum, however, has sparked controversy, as they are viewed by the parents as pushing a particular narrative around gender identity and sexuality that is inconsistent with their religious beliefs and principles of sound science?.
One of the contested books, “Love, Violet,” intended for children as young as kindergarten, explores the theme of girls developing romantic feelings for other girls.
Another book, “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” aimed at kindergarten-age children as well, introduces the idea that a girl could actually be a boy.
A third book, “Pride Puppy,” designed for children aged three to five, serves as an introduction to Pride parades.
The lawsuit also mentions that these books invite children as young as three to search for images related to LGBTQ activism and specific symbols like the “intersex flag,” amongst others??.
The parents’ legal team, led by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative law firm with a focus on religious freedom, argues that the school board’s actions violate Maryland state law, which requires school boards to notify parents about any curriculum material related to “sexuality” and permits parents to withdraw their child from such lessons.
The lawsuit further claims that the board has breached one of its own policies, as it has allegedly informed parents that they can no longer opt their children out of this particular curriculum??.
Eric Baxter, Vice President and Senior Counsel at the Becket Fund, voiced the parents’ concerns, stating, “Children are entitled to guidance from their own parents, who know and love them best, regarding how they’ll be introduced to complex issues concerning gender identity, transgenderism, and human sexuality.”
He further added, “Forced, ideological discussions during story hour won’t cut it, and excluding parents will only hinder, not help, inclusivity”?.
The lawsuit is the latest example of parents nationwide asserting their rights in the face of school decisions that they believe conflict with their values and beliefs.
The parents are seeking an immediate injunction against the school board’s policy of no parental notice or opt-out option.
Named in the lawsuit are school board members and Superintendent Monifa McKnight of Montgomery County Public Schools, an affluent district located just north of Washington, D.C.?.
What does this mean for you as parents, educators, and concerned citizens?
It’s a call to action to remain vigilant and involved in our children’s education, to ensure that our values and beliefs are respected, and to fight for our rights to guide our children’s understanding of complex issues.
After all, as Baxter puts it, “When it comes to kids, it’s still ‘mom and dad know best.’ Schools can best help kids learn kindness by teaming up with parents, not cutting them out of the picture”??.
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Woke judges say there are topics high school kids CAN’T debate
My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions and think outside the box.
It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter.
And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association nationals, sixth at the Harvard national and was runner-up at the Emory national.
After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami.
There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.
First, some background.
Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team.
She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round.
During that time squeeze — perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis — she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA.
That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate.
If a judge prefers competitors not “spread” — speak a mile a minute — debaters will moderate their pace.
If a judge emphasizes “impacts” — the reasons why an argument matters — debaters adjust accordingly.
But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom, she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”
How will knowing that information about the judge change the way she makes her case?
Traditionally, high school students would have encountered a judge like former West Point debater Henry Smith, whose paradigm asks students to “focus on clarity over speed” and reminds them that “every argument should explain exactly how [they] win the debate.”
In the past few years, however, judges with paradigms tainted by politics and ideology are becoming common.
Debate judge Shubham Gupta’s paradigm reads, “If you are discussing immigrants in a round and describe the person as ‘illegal,’ I will immediately stop the round, give you the loss with low speaks” — low speaker points — “give you a stern lecture, and then talk to your coach. . . . I will not have you making the debate space unsafe.”
Debate Judge Kriti Sharma concurs: under her list of “Things That Will Cause You To Automatically Lose,” number three is “Referring to immigrants as ‘illegal.’ ”
Should a high school student automatically lose and be publicly humiliated for using a term that’s not only ubiquitous in media and politics but accurate?
Once students have been exposed to enough of these partisan paradigms, they internalize that point of view and adjust their arguments going forward.
That’s why you rarely see students present arguments in favor of capitalism, defending Israel or challenging affirmative action.
Most students choose not to fight this coercion.
They see it as a necessary evil that’s required to win debates and secure accolades, scholarships and college acceptance letters.
On paper, the NSDA rejects what Lavender, Gupta and Sharma are doing. Its rules state, “Judges should decide the round as it is debated, not based on their personal beliefs.”
https://nypost.com/2023/05/26/woke-judges-say-there-are-topics-high-school-kids-cant-debate/
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25 May, 2023
Prominent Black Poet Laments ‘Ban’ on Her Inaugural Poem by Florida School
One problem with the poet’s claim — it isn’t true. Poems are a dime a dozen anyway. There are fat books full of them. Only one in a million is widely memorable
A prominent American poet, Amanda Gorman, has riled up liberals across the country by falsely claiming that the poem she read at President Biden’s inauguration in 2021 has been banned by an elementary school in Florida.
In a public letter posted to Twitter, the 25-year-old Ms. Gorman — the youngest poet to ever read at a presidential inauguration — claimed that a book that features one of her poems, “The Hill We Climb,” was banned by an elementary school at Miami Lakes, Florida. “I’m gutted,” Ms. Gorman wrote. “Robbing children of the right to find their voices is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”
Ms. Gorman posted a copy of the complaint that led to her poem being banned, which was filed by an unnamed parent in late March. The handwritten complaint stated in broken English that a book containing the poem was “not educational” and carried “indirect” hate messages.
“Unnecessary bookbans like these are on the rise and we must fight back,” Ms. Gorman said. “And let’s be clear: most of the forbidden works are by authors who have struggled for generations to get on bookshelves. The majority of these censored works are by queer and non-white authors.”
She ended her screed with a plea for people to donate to PEN America, a free-speech nonprofit based in New York that has been fundraising in recent months to fight what it believes to be an epidemic of book bans across the United States. As of Wednesday morning, Ms. Gorman had raised more than $50,000 for PEN America.
The social media post generated howls of protests from very online liberals and spawned dozens of headlines in American media outlets repeating her claim that the poem had been banned by the school. In an appearance on MSNBC, PEN America’s chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, blamed Governor DeSantis for creating an “enabling environment for book bans” in the state of Florida.
“There’s an election on the horizon and there’s a notion that certain people can get energized and motivated by this and they are going to play to that segment and rile them up and it’s up to us to mobilize the rest — the majority,” she said.
The only problem with the narrative being pushed by Ms. Gorman and other activists, however, is that it isn’t true. After the uproar, the Miami-Dade school district released a statement saying that it felt “compelled to clarify that the book titled, ‘The Hill We Climb’ by Amanda Gorman was never banned or removed from one of our schools. The book is available in the media center as part of the middle grades collection.”
The district explained to the Miami Herald, which first reported the incident, that following the parent’s complaint a panel consisting of teachers, administrators, a guidance counselor, and a library media specialist at the Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes decided that Ms. Gorman’s book and a handful of others were more appropriate for middle-school-aged students than elementary ones and were placed on a different shelf in the same library.
On Wednesday morning, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Daniella Levine Cava, extended an invitation to Ms. Gorman to visit South Florida. “Your poem inspired our youth to become active participants in their government and to help shape the future,” she said in a post on Twitter. “We want you to come to Miami-Dade to do a reading of your poem.”
Following the uproar, Ms. Gorman also attempted to explain the discrepancy between her original complaint and subsequent reports about the ban. “A school book ban is any action taken against a book that leaves access to a book restricted or diminished,” she said. “This decision of moving my book from its original place, taken after one parent complained, diminishes the access elementary schoolers would have previously had to my poem.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/prominent-poet-laments-ban-on-her-inaugural-poem-by-florida-school
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Texas Set to Give Boot to Leftist DEI Offices at Public College Campuses
Texas may soon become the second state to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from public colleges.
In early May, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation to prevent colleges and universities there from using federal or state funds on DEI programs. Like on many other issues, Florida and DeSantis have demonstrated that just a few men with courage can reveal a majority.
It turns out that by following through with a clear and directed agenda, Republicans in the Sunshine State have made themselves more popular with more people. Other red states are following in the wake of that success.
On Friday, the Texas House of Representatives voted 83-60 to pass legislation that would ban DEI programs and offices in state colleges and universities.
After the Texas Senate originally passed the bill last month, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick issued a statement:
The Texas Senate has now passed the strongest pushback on woke policies in higher education nationwide. For far too long, academia has been poisoned by woke policies and faculty seeking to indoctrinate our students.
Professors did not believe we would push back on their advances, but they were wrong. Students should be taught how to think critically, not what to think.
Democrats got some concessions in the House. For instance, the final text of the bill, according to the Texas Tribune, “requires the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to conduct an annual study into the impact of banning DEI offices, allows universities to make ‘reasonable efforts’ to re-assign employees in DEI offices to new positions with similar pay, and shifts the day the bill goes into effect back by three months to Jan. 1.”
The bill will now go back to the Senate for approval of the House amendments to the legislation.
Unsurprisingly, Democrats are apoplectic.
“Diversity is not a threat. Equitable access to education is not a threat. Inclusion is not a threat,” state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, D-Dallas, said during debate on the bill on Friday, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “We turn our cheek away from the real threats that our communities face—the threats of gun violence, threats of poverty, housing insecurity, the threat of illiteracy.”
The idea that these DEI administrative cliques at schools aren’t just another way to promote and enforce ideological conformity is laughable. What they promote is a threat to our free society.
So, thanks to the Texas Legislature, a small but significant bastion of indoctrination will soon be eliminated. It’s a good start, but there’s a long way to go before declaring “victory.”
Even without these programs, left-wing cultural values will continue to be dominant among the college-educated elite. However, every time one of these institutional gatekeepers is defunded, disempowered, and defanged, a streak of light comes through for those still seeking the truth.
This is how you win.
Over a dozen other states are considering similar legislation.
Almost uniquely in the West, our system of federalism—frayed as it is—provides a staging ground for a serious counterrevolution to the great awokening. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s in the states where representative self-government remains closest to how it was originally intended to be in this country.
Sure, some states will sink into idiocy, like California and Illinois. But others are showing that there’s another way.
The Biden administration is doing everything it can to maximize the power of the DEI machine—not that the federal bureaucracy needed much coaxing. But the fact that states are taking charge of their own destiny and nipping the woke cultural revolution in the bud is a good sign.
Our colleges and universities are the woke Left’s equivalent of religious institutions. Too long have public universities been given a blank check to do as they please. We’ve unwittingly created a kind of established secular church. They won’t reform from within, so now higher education must be pressured from without.
The Left obsesses over the notion that every public institution must “look like America.” We the people need to insist that our schools think like America, or at least represent the diversity of thought that exists here. DEI offices currently function to inculcate ideological conformity and promote the pernicious identitarianism that’s destroying free thought, free speech, and civil society.
Why are we surprised that generations of the American elite, taught in our schools to think that the ladder of success requires conformity to left-wing cultural values, carry those values over to their jobs in government and the boardroom?
In most cases, wokeness doesn’t survive when put to a vote. The Left likes to tout “democracy,” but they ultimately fear it. They fear what will happen when people wake up and find that they have the power to do something about the noxious changes happening in our country.
That should be encouraging, even though we can’t lose sight of the fact that the Left still has disproportionately enormous and lasting institutional, elite cultural strength.
The best—and perhaps only—way to counter that power is through careful, incremental policy change and a direct counteroffensive through elected representatives.
Florida is leading the way, Texas is following suit, and a wave of other states will likely join after seeing success.
The counterrevolution is building. We aren’t done yet.
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Australia: Qld schools accused of covert gender counselling without involving parents
Queensland parents have come forward to accuse school guidance officers of advising students as young as 12 on how to go about changing their names, pronouns, and gender – without including parents.
School guidance officers are advising students as young as 12 on how to go about changing their names, pronouns, and gender – without including parents.
Two Queensland families say they were cut out of the process for weeks, with one claiming a guidance officer encouraged their child to lie to support a potential case to cut ties with their parents.
The Department of Education said consent is needed for students to receive ongoing guidance officer support, but officers can judge whether a child be considered a “mature minor” – a legal test of a child’s intelligence and understanding – and consent to services themselves.
The allegations come after The Courier-Mail revealed teachers are being forced to deceive parents when a student asks the school to help them change their gender, pronouns or name.
In fresh claims, a mother to two daughters who both changed to male names and pronouns, said her younger child was “groomed” by the guidance officer at her Queensland state school.
The mother said her daughter – referred to as “Claire” – was groomed into believing her home was not safe if her parents did not affirm her new identity.
The mother claims Claire was encouraged by the guidance officer to make a false allegation against her mother’s husband, to support her case if she wanted to be considered a “mature minor” and move out of home in the future. In the end, Claire withdrew the allegations.
“It is telling anxious kids that their mother and father are not safe because they will not affirm (their new identity), they’re being exploited by these school counsellors,” Claire’s mother said.
Meanwhile, a father said his daughter spoke to her state school in late 2020 about changing her name and pronouns. Plans were made for this change to take effect in Term 1, 2021.
But the father was only informed by the school days before it resumed about his daughter’s planned name and pronoun changes and that she would wear a boy’s uniform.
The father believes his daughter spoke to the guidance officer for three months before he was informed. He said his daughter did not want him to know.
“They were going to put it (new gender identity) in place without telling me initially, just a flick of the switch. There was no communication and no support plan,” he said.
“I felt that the school took over that parental role.”
A Department of Education spokeswoman said guidance officers may refer students who require specialised support, for a range of reasons, to external support services.
“Consent for students to receive ongoing support from a guidance officer must be obtained,” the spokeswoman said.
“The Department provides comprehensive information to assist school staff, including guidance officers, in making decisions that ensure gender diverse students receive appropriate support, tailored to their individual needs.
“While consent is often provided by parents, guidance officers use their professional judgment to determine if a student has sufficient maturity and understanding to be considered a mature minor and therefore consent to services.”
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24 May, 2023
‘I Would Like to Have My Job Back’: School Counselor Sues After Being Fired for Disagreeing With Transgender Policy
PENDLETON, Ind.—An Indiana school district violated a guidance counselor’s right to free speech by retaliating against and ultimately firing her for saying parents should know about their teenage children’s interest in “transitioning” to the opposite sex, the former counselor argues in a lawsuit filed Thursday.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a law firm that protects religious liberty and represents veteran high school counselor Kathy McCord, says in the lawsuit that South Madison Community School Corporation in Pendleton, Indiana, had no authority to tell McCord who she may speak to after hours and off school property.
ADF also contends that McCord’s religious rights as a Christian were trampled by the South Madison school district, specifically her closely held value that parents should be involved in important decisions regarding their children.
“I would like to have my job back; I would like to go back to school,” McCord, a guidance counselor for 25 years at Pendleton Heights High School, said Wednesday in an interview with The Daily Signal. “I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else. It’s terrible what they’re doing to parents. And I really wasn’t ready to retire, so I’d like to go back to work.”
After The Daily Signal exposed the South Madison school district’s hidden policy of supporting students’ gender transitions without necessarily informing parents, the school board fired McCord on March 9 for confirming the policy’s existence. Some school board members, however, later changed their stated reasons for terminating her multiple times.
The school district’s so-called Gender Support Plan required McCord to instruct teachers to withhold information regarding “gender changes” from some parents based on a student’s say-so. That provision prompted teacher Amanda Keegan to resign in protest.
“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 told The Daily Signal in an earlier interview.
Speaking Wednesday to The Daily Signal, McCord said that South Madison’s actions forced her to comply with decisions that negatively affected students and their families.
“By not working with parents, [the district’s Gender Support Plan] harmed the students,” the former counselor said.
After an investigation lasting over three months, the South Madison school board voted unanimously to fire McCord, amid boos and jeers from the audience at its March 9 meeting. In support of McCord, T-shirts worn in the bipartisan crowd of parents and teachers read: “Keep Kathy.”
“You should be ashamed of yourselves,” one parent told the board.
Alliance Defending Freedom filed the lawsuit on McCord’s behalf in the Indianapolis-based U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
ADF argues that the South Madison school district violated both the U.S. Constitution and the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires government entities to prove that every contested policy is “the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.”
ADF points out in the court filing:
South Madison and its employees told Mrs. McCord that she had no choice but to comply with the Gender Support Plan policy and threatened her with adverse employment action if she chose not to comply, telling her that South Madison would treat noncompliance as insubordination.
South Madison cannot demonstrate that the Gender Support Plan policy is the least restrictive means of furthering any interest it might have; instead, South Madison could have, for example: allowed Mrs. McCord to refrain from using pronouns to which she objects while simultaneously avoiding pronouns that a student has requested not be used; allowed her to use nicknames; or, transferred Mrs. McCord’s students with a Gender Support Plan to one of the other school counselors who doesn’t share her objections.
As a result, South Madison cannot demonstrate that [its] Gender Support Plan policy is ‘the least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.’
In requiring teachers, counselors, and other school system staff to speak in highly specific terms that go against their political and religious beliefs, ADF maintains, South Madison is complicit in compelling speech:
By requiring Mrs. McCord to participate in the Gender Support Plan policy, including by socially transitioning students and hiding some students’ social transition from their parents, South Madison has compelled Mrs. McCord to speak its viewpoint on a matter of public concern.
“Mrs. McCord had no valid official duty to participate in students’ social transition, or hide it from parents,” Vincent Wagner, senior counsel in ADF’s Center for Parental Rights, told The Daily Signal.
“[It’s] so important to highlight [that] we know kids do so much better when parents are involved with their lives,” Wagner added. “Both the social science data and common sense are clear—kids need their parents’ help, especially in difficult situations.”
In a statement to gathered parents after the school board voted to fire McCord, board member Buck Evans accused her of falsifying documents sent to The Daily Signal.
Evans apparently was referring to the school system’s secretive Gender Support Plan, which McCord had confirmed but not provided to The Daily Signal.
The school board shared no evidence of any falsification of documents, and its “fact-finding” sheet provided to local news reporters contained different reasons for firing McCord than those suggested by Evans and board President Mike Hanna.
Email timestamps and additional evidence provided from The Daily Signal revealed that the statements made by Evans are false, although the South Madison school district continues to refuse comment to any news outlet concerning the discrepancies.
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The escalating madness of woke dogma on college campuses
Once an arena of dueling beliefs, colleges have been taken over by a woke left agenda that will tolerate no dissent.
Just a few weeks ago, on the campus of San Francisco State University, Riley Gaines, a 12-time All-American swimmer, was nearly mauled by an angry group of protesters who took issue with her message that biological men have no place in women’s sports.
She was chased down a hallway and practically held captive, all because she had the audacity to stand up against the left-wing mob.
The administration of San Francisco State never offered the 23-year-old swimmer an apology. Instead, it sought to cast her as the aggressor.
In a statement released by the University’s president, Lynn Mahoney, she described Riley’s presence on campus as “deeply traumatic” for the trans community and chose to commend — rather than condemn — the SFSU student body for exercising their so-called right to free speech.
America’s college students didn’t learn to be ideological bigots overnight — revulsed by the ideals of freedom of speech and expression.
But they learned over time and they learned by example, from professors such as Shellyne Rodriguez, who until her termination Tuesday evening served as an adjunct professor at Hunter College, a public college that is a part of the City University of New York system.
In footage posted onto Twitter by Students for Life of America, Rodriguez is seen tearing into a group of anti-abortion students who had been tabling in an academic building.
She accuses them of spreading “f–king propaganda” and engaging in violence, only moments before proceeding to push their anti-abortion materials onto the ground and walking away.
There was once a time when college campuses existed to be the battlefield of ideas, where discourse was welcome and differences of opinion were championed.
If even today’s college professors have lost sight of that, how can we be surprised that America’s young people have as well?
Contrary to her claim, it wasn’t the anti-abortion students who chose violence in that video. It was Rodriguez.
Days later, she held a machete to the neck of a New York Post reporter.
Rodriguez didn’t just choose violence.
She chose bigotry; she chose suppression.
She chose intolerance.
Everything her progressive dogma claims to be against.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/23/escalating-madness-of-woke-dogma-on-campus/
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A Collegiate Renaissance?
Intelligent observers of American higher education know that colleges generally are in great trouble: falling enrollments, declining public and political support, often dubious outcomes, and excessive tuition and other costs. Most depressing, the traditional tolerance of widespread viewpoints and commitment to free expression seem to have declined substantially.
While one finds a few encouraging stories dealing with these issues at existing colleges and universities, the overall picture is bleak. It seems that current institutions are doing too little, if anything, to fix the problem. At many, the outlook is palpably worsening.
In the competitive, free-market, private-business sector, lags in innovation or qualitative improvement are remedied by Schumpeterian “creative destruction” and by new competition. Hence Eastman Kodak has nearly died in photography and Tesla has prospered in automobiles as a consequence of changes in technology and taste.
So, too, can new entrants into the collegiate market potentially help to reverse the declining higher-education industry in America. I recently attended a summit of higher-education thinkers and philanthropists sponsored by the new University of Austin (UATX). UATX will admit its first class in the fall of 2024, but it is already doing a number of academic activities—for example, running short summer seminars for crackerjack students at other schools—as a trial run for a future as a full-fledged university.
It is not an ordinary group of academics who are leading UATX’s inception. The founding president, Pano Kanelos, was the former president of the “great books” college St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe). Prestigious academics like Charles Calomiris (Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University) are taking pay cuts to join, full-time, the management and instructional team at UATX.
Others at the meeting who are assisting in the creation of the institution included the brilliant historian Niall Ferguson (Stanford and Harvard), John Tomasi (until recently at Brown, now running the Heterodox Academy), and the award-winning Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who gave a stirring address to the audience. It is my understanding that former Princeton classicist Joshua Katz will be joining the faculty.
It’s an academic dream team.
While UATX has a long-term goal of being a serious university like Princeton or Chicago, with thousands of students, it will probably open next year with a high-quality freshman class of 100-200. All students will study, together, a common curriculum for the first two years, reviewing in detail the evolution of modern civilization and developing the tools to help advance it in the future. During their last two years, students will branch out into more advanced study in specialized fields.
The school plans to break with convention in a number of ways.
For one thing, there will be no faculty tenure. Nor will there be any constitutionally planned parliamentary bodies at UATX (i.e., faculty and student senates), as is common at most schools. But there will be an adjudicative council (an academic judiciary) to resolve the inevitable occasional brouhaha.
First and foremost, as the school’s mission statement (which has undergone exhaustive review, including by the attendees at the conclave) clearly proclaims, is UATX’s “commitment to the pursuit of truth” and its appreciation of vigorous but civilized debate fostered within “an environment of intellectual pluralism.”
The school has already amassed an impressive group of entrepreneurs and philanthropists committed to creating more than another Texas-centric liberal-arts institution but, rather, a national, indeed international, respected innovator in higher education.
At a reception at the estate of board chair and high-tech entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, I saw some of the best and brightest names in American capitalist innovation mingling with an equally distinguished group of academics (including professors from schools not mentioned above—for example, the University of Chicago). There were scientists and classicists, artists and economists.
Yet all believe, as I do, that American higher education is broken and that reform within current institutions is problematic. There are too many vested interests that will fiercely fight efforts at improvement .
One huge problem is the lack of intellectual diversity and tolerance of alternative perspectives on campus. Another, older problem is the vast inefficiency in the system (UATX vows to have a lean administrative structure, including no DEI apparatchiks). Some schools overly obsess over ball-throwing contests (i.e., football or basketball). Nationally, grade inflation has contributed to a decline in work effort, diluting the traditional American virtue of excelling at near-impossible tasks. The list of academic sins is long, and starting new institutions initially free of those sins strikes me as a good idea.
Yet it may not be enough, particularly given the huge role played by governments, especially the Washington bureaucracy, in American academic life. Educrats on Maryland Avenue in D.C. (home of the U.S. Department of Education) issue rules that submissive university executives obey and often enthusiastically embrace, such as ones dictating how colleges should handle issues relating to allegations of student sexual misconduct. These rules are often fundamentally out of sync with Anglo-American jurisprudence dating back to the Magna Carta.
It seems to me that, currently, there is an implicit contract between the mainline higher-education establishment (represented by organizations such as the American Council on Education or the Association of American Universities), their rent-seeking schools, and the federal government.
The Feds, now represented by the Biden Administration, will bail out the universities (through, e.g., pandemic-related funds) in return for support in the form of leftish ideas, personnel (to run government bureaucracies), and campaign contributions from faculty and staff. Growing political uncertainties potentially jeopardize that implicit Unholy Alliance, and a Republican takeover of government might lead to an even bleaker future for traditional colleges and universities, improving the prospects for new innovations like the University of Austin.
Another issue may be accreditation. As I have elsewhere argued, accreditors are cartels that restrain entry into the realm of higher-education services. UATX will either have to obtain institutional accreditation or try to innovate by saying, “We don’t care about accreditation,” a gutsy but certainly not risk-free approach. At this point, accreditation is still an undecided question for the new institution’s officials.
American exceptionalism has evolved out of new ideas and innovations that occur by taking risks. UATX is in that tradition, and my impression is that it should be taken very seriously.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14510&omhide=true&trk=rm
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23 May, 2023
UT Austin Spends Over $13 Million on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Salaries
The University of Texas at Austin spends more than $13 million on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) salaries for close to 200 jobs, according to documents obtained by The Epoch Times.
That’s enough money to fund 342 in-state students to attend one of Texas’ top publicly funded universities for a year, based on $35,000 in annual tuition.
The Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DCE) at UT Austin paid 171 employee salaries totaling some $12.2 million, according to documents obtained through an open records request.
Another $1.4 million in salaries were paid to 14 associate deans called Coalition of Diversity Equity and Inclusion officers, according to the documents.
UT Austin’s expenditures on DEI paint a picture of a vast network of workers dedicated to a contentious sociopolitical movement that has taken hold in America’s institutions.
Much of the money spent on salaries support what critics describe as “woke” programs based on social justice activism. Vast amounts of taxpayer money spent on DEI salaries demonstrate what detractors say is a bloated system siphoning money away from academics.
DCE supports multiple learning centers and programs throughout UT Austin. Positions at affiliated programs include the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, Youth Engagement Center, Office for Inclusion and Equity, and even an elementary school that helps train future teachers to be well versed in the movement’s ideology.
The diversity division pays another $11.7 million for public charter schools to help children in crisis and UIL salaries, apparently unrelated to DEI.
Scott Yenor, a Boise State University political science professor, is senior director of state coalitions at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.
Yenor told The Epoch Times that DEI had been woven into every facet of universities nationwide, making it difficult to determine how much public money is being spent supporting controversial political ideologies.
“Nearly every college has a dean that’s dedicated to it,” he said.
Yenor pointed to the costs of offering majors at UT Austin dedicated to DEI, such as African and African Diaspora Studies and Race, Indigeneity & Migration.
Another DEI major at UT Austin Texas is Women’s and Gender Studies, which includes classes to analyze the “social narratives of gender, race, and sexuality,” according to the school’s website.
Minors at UT Austin include Critical Disability Studies and Latino Media Arts and Studies, Yenor said.
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Cornell wants to ‘express itself’ but ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ are in the way
When I heard that Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, would announce that Free Expression will be the theme for the 2023-2024 academic year, I was delighted.
It seemed like Cornell was turning a corner from its poor record on free expression documented by the organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).
Indeed, just before her announcement, Pollack had given two wins to free expression.
She rejected a Student Assembly resolution to mandate content warnings for traumatic content in the classroom, and for her bravery, she won the Cojones Award from alumnus Bill Maher.
But when I read what Pollack had to say, I realized that the Free Expression theme was actually a ruse. Pollack had stacked the steering committee with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) scholars.
I wrote individually to each member requesting links to their work on free expression —and heard, even up to today — nothing but crickets.
Then the campus paper the Cornell Daily Sun reported that Pollack will defend DEI as strongly as she defends free expression. This is a tragedy because free expression cannot coexist with DEI.
Cornell, the first American Ivy League university, should be a citadel of freedom — particularly for the freedom of thought and the freedom of speech — both of which contribute to the mental change required for intellectual growth. The goal of DEI activism, however, is the antithesis of free expression. Activists tend to believe they already know what is true and demonstrate little need for discussions that can change hearts and minds. They readily say so themselves.
Ibram X. Kendi, the most prominent leader in the DEI movement, for instance, concedes in his seminal book “How to be an Antiracist” — “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change . . . [and the] Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy.”
Unlike the civil- and gay-rights movements, which required free speech to change legislation, the DEI movement requires the cancellation of free speech to influence power and policy. This is because the DEI bureaucrats are activists-in-disguise, at once unable and unwilling to defend their ideology with reasoned arguments based on truth.
This was demonstrated last month in a debate at MIT on a resolution that academic DEI programs should be abolished. None of the approximately 90 people in DEI positions at MIT chose to defend their ideology by participating in the debate.
The debate still took place; and interestingly, there was agreement between Pat Kambhampati and Heather Mac Donald who argued for the resolution, and Karith Foster and Pamela Denise Long who argued against the resolution. They all agreed that the university DEI bureaucrats have gone off the rails.
Foster summed it up like so: “When DEI is done poorly — and let us be absolutely honest, it has taken a left turn — it creates insurmountable barriers of fear, mistrust, vengeance, and indifference.”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, well-meaning administrators across Cornell surrendered their mission to seek truth and replaced it with the mission of critical social justice, whose postmodernist foundations deny objective truth. Indoctrination replaced education.
Cornell used to encourage the search for truth through the discovery of new knowledge but has morphed into something omnipotent, if not sclerotic.
The free thinkers have been replaced by followers who mindlessly speak past each other using platitudes and bromides.
The solutions to every problem are to add more rules and regulatons, and to do what seems expedient at that moment. The bureaucracy does not encourage dissenters and governs by coercion, compulsion, and mandates.
I am speaking out against the institutional cancel culture at Cornell in the hope that I will be as successful as I was last year in un-canceling the bust of Abraham Lincoln, which was removed from a campus library following unspecified “complaints.”
According to postmodernism, the only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth. Without a foundation of truth, there can be no reasoned argument capable of changing the viewpoints of others.
In the pursuit of critical social justice, there is no time to question the DEI orthodoxy or to waver from the thin party line.
The DEI ideology excludes even the slightest diversity of thought.
It is ironic that the front lines of the DEI movement are found in our universities whose mission has always been the search for and dissemination of truth through open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil free expression.
Except for a small minority of believers, both for or against DEI, fear quashes free expression, and leads to self-censorship among the students and faculty.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/20/diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-in-cornells-way/
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Why Britain is falling behind in the global universities race
Britain still excels when it comes to higher education. Britain has seven of the world’s top 50 universities. In spite of many claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in the number of foreign students, the intake has never been higher. In 2021-22, there were 680,000 overseas students in higher education in Britain, an increase of 123,000 in just two years.
That’s good news for the British economy. A report by London Economics estimated that one year’s intake of students would, by the time their courses had finished, bring in £29 billion in revenue from tuition fees and other income. Importantly, the benefits are spread all over the country: the University of Manchester and the University of Edinburgh each have around 18,000 overseas students.
But higher education is a global race and our place is in danger. This year’s table by the Center for World University Rankings – which measures the employability of graduates as well as the quality of research – shows 55 out of 93 UK universities on the slide. Thirty-two have improved their rankings, while Cambridge and Oxford retain their positions at fourth and fifth respectively. But the reason a larger number of universities are slipping is that China’s universities are on the way up. This matters not least because China is currently the biggest single source of overseas students at UK universities: some 152,000.
While their international reputations remain high, UK universities have not helped themselves over the past few years. Some have harmed their role as bastions of free speech by giving in to small bands of student activists who have demanded speakers be banned; at others, students have demanded that the curriculum be revised to suit their beliefs – reversing the traditional arrangement whereby tutors teach and students learn.
It’s also hard to compete on a global level when the best academics are paid so little. A depressing fact of British university life is that so often any scholar who achieves widespread recognition or success will be poached by an American Ivy League university offering a far greater salary – and often given a job that requires far less administrative work. In a place where the reputation of professors attracts students, it’s important to draw and retain the top talent.
Part of the problem is a failure to raise fees in line with inflation. The maximum has barely increased since it was set at £9,000 in 2010. At the time, student fees were deeply controversial – yet private schools, which educate 14 per cent of British sixth formers, charge much more. Why should families who manage to pay £30,000 a year for schools be subsidised when it comes to university? In an economy in which what you learn is closely linked to what you earn, there’s a strong case for asking families who can afford it to pay to meet the cost of tuition.
To remain competitive on a global level, Britain’s universities should be given the resources to win talent. American universities have a tradition of using fee money from wealthier families to subsidise those who cannot afford it: there’s a case for an element of that being introduced here as well.
The danger is that, if universities do not fight for their independence, they become playthings of the government – forced to link admission to diversity targets rather than merit. It is right to make allowances for students who might not have had their interview techniques polished at a private school, but universities already do that. If private schools account for around 30 per cent of the top A-level grades (as they currently do), it’s natural that they also account for a similar proportion of those getting into top universities.
Open discrimination against candidates on the basis of presumed privilege is deeply wrong – and also starts to undermine the status of the university from being a seat of unashamed excellence into an instrument of social engineering.
A university education is not everything. For many people, going from school straight into employment will be more appropriate; there are already far too many courses of no use to either students or society. Qualifications should never be fetishised to the point of writing off people who, for various reasons, might have missed out on them when young. The Spectator is one of many employers to make a point of not asking new recruits about their education but hiring on an aptitude test alone.
Yet a university education remains, for many, an important part of a successful and fulfilling life. Moreover, much of the research which informs an advanced society originates in its universities.
Britain is fortunate to have some of the best universities in the world, but we cannot take their reputations for granted. They must strive to remain at the top of their game.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/university-challenge-5/
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22 May, 2023
The DEI industry really isn’t about diversity, equity OR inclusion
Most Americans are all for diversity, equity and inclusion. But Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs have proved to be about nothing but rank racism.
So Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was pretty on-point last week, in the run-up to announcing his presidential bid, when he defunded DEI programs at public colleges and universities across the Sunshine State, joining Republican legislatures and govs from Ohio to Texas.
Just look at how corrosively toxic DEI efforts prove in practice:
Faculty at the University of California/San Francisco’s medical school recently produced a journal article endorsing racial segregation in education as “part of a broader antiracism and anti-oppression curriculum.”
In its official glossary, the University of Central Florida designates “male, white, heterosexual, financially stable, young-middle adult, able-bodied, Christian” as oppressors.
A student house near Berkeley forbid white people from common spaces to allegedly provide a “safe environment for people who identify as People of Color.”
In Arizona, DEI statements — in which applicants swear fealty to the movement’s principles — are required for between 28% and 81% of job openings at public universities.
The State University of New York has instituted a requirement that all students (no matter their majors) pass a racial-equity course on “power, privilege, oppression and opportunity.”
A survey by the nonprofit Speech First found a shocking 91% of schools push far left ideas on “microaggressions, anti-racism, trigger warnings, bias, racial equity” in their freshman orientation material.
No wonder more than 80% of college kids, per speech-rights outfit FIRE, “report self-censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time.”
And the movement eats its own: De Anza Community College fired a high-ranking DEI official for insufficient zeal, with colleagues absurdly calling the black woman a white supremacist.
Our nation is premised on the idea that all people are created equal. And, given the dazzling array of races, creeds and religions it plays home to, a culture that emphasizes what we have in common over what divides us is a pragmatic necessity (as well as a moral good).
That’s precisely what DEI attacks, by creating a hyperconsciousness of race founded in exaggerated grievances. It identifies whites as the enemy of everyone non-white, disparages meritocracy, and blames gaps in achievement exclusively on racist “systemic” forces.
The name DEI, of course, is pure Orwell: These ideas foster only homogeneity of thought, inequity and exclusion — alienating Americans from each other and poisoning our politics.
That DEI is a $9 billion industry only makes the whole movement all the uglier.
Though it does explain the endless howls of outrage about the public-money cutoff: The gravy train is leaving the station.
In short, DEI is a cynical grift that’s minted a new batch of millionaires while hurting the nation and deepening racial divisions.
What DeSantis & Co are doing is the only sensible way forward — on ending the scam and healing the country.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/20/the-dei-industry-really-isnt-about-diversity-equity-or-inclusion/
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Why Do Taxpayers Keep Funding Schools That Don’t Educate Our Children?
With no incentive to educate and retain students, "hold-harmless" systems are free to waste thousands on administrative bloat.
That helps explain why the Philadelphia school district spends over $26,000 per student, two-thirds more than Pennsylvania’s median spending.
Schools educating fewer students and providing a poor education should receive less money, not more.
The best example of “failing up” today might be “hold harmless” provisions for district public schools.
Under such terms, the funding of failing schools cannot decrease when students leave them for high-performing charter schools. With no incentive to educate and retain students, hold-harmless systems are free to waste thousands on administrative bloat.
Even in cases where some money follows the student to a different school, the public system retains thousands of taxpayer dollars each time a student flees a hold-harmless school. That insulates failing schools from the competitive pressure of school choice.
When schools compete for students and therefore for funding, they must improve the quality of education to attract and retain students. That creates a rising tide that lifts all boats, including those public schools that provide a poor education today.
No parent wants their child trapped in a school where few children can read and write at grade level. Thankfully, a growing number of parents are fortunate enough to live in 32 states that offer either education savings accounts, vouchers, or tax credit scholarships that provide families with a choice of where to educate their children.
But as parents choose to leave schools that aren’t meeting their children’s needs, the hold-harmless provisions enable many of these schools to retain their funding, even though their expenses decline.
With more money per pupil, they could hire better teachers, including specialists, buy technological learning aids, and make other investments to improve educational outcomes. But they do few of those things.
Instead, hold-harmless schools in states such as Maryland, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania hire administrators and create bloated bureaucracies. About half the Philadelphia school district employees in the 2022-2023 school year aren’t even teachers.
That helps explain why the Philadelphia school district spends over $26,000 per student, two-thirds more than Pennsylvania’s median spending. By contrast, First Philadelphia Preparatory Charter School—where 99.8% of the students are considered economically disadvantaged—spends just $14,000 per student. That’s less than the state’s median spending and little more than half what traditional urban public schools spend.
Catholic schools in the City of Brotherly Love also manage to do more with less. Father Judge High School charges $9,400 in tuition and fees, although the school receives subsidies from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, increasing the amount spent per student.
Despite spending significantly less than their district public school counterparts, alternatives like charter schools and Catholic schools achieve better educational outcomes, including higher test scores.
Meanwhile, in the Philadelphia school district, only 16.2% of students in third through eighth grade scored at least proficient in mathematics. More than 4 in 5 students are behind on the fundamentals.
The problem isn’t unique to Philadelphia. Consider Illinois. The Prairie State leads the nation on district-level administration, spending over $1 billion annually while achieving below-average scores in mathematics and reading.
Nationwide, from 2000 to 2019, the number of students in public schools increased 7.6% while the number of teachers grew 8.7%. Both of those pale in comparison with the growth of administrators, which came in at an astounding 87.6%.
This helps explain why students in many districts continue to have poor educational outcomes even as the amount spent on each student continues to rise. It turns out the money is going to administrators and other waste, not education.
The way to remove the ratchet effect of school funding in hold-harmless provisions is to roll back the policy itself. Schools that are failing parents and children don’t deserve to continue riding the gravy train of taxpayer money.
Further reforms are needed. Similar misallocations of taxpayer dollars occur in places where funding is based not on the most recent enrollment data, but on outdated figures. In Wisconsin, enrollment is measured by a three-year rolling average, which currently overestimates the number of students in traditional public schools by almost 21,000, causing a misallocation of $359 million this year alone.
Free markets work because sellers must compete for buyers’ dollars. Firms that don’t meet customers’ needs bring in less revenue or go out of business. Similarly, schools educating fewer students and providing a poor education should receive less money, not more. When this basic market functionality is short-circuited by misguided education policy, the quality of education lapses.
The recent creation or expansion of education savings account-style options in Arkansas, Iowa and Utah, which give families control over a share of their child’s public education funding, are tremendous victories for families. The wins are especially important in disadvantaged communities since education is the path out of poverty for millions of young Americans.
As other states follow suit, every dollar of funding should follow students to deliver educational opportunities to the next generation.
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Australia: ‘Boarding saves so much time’: Why city student Sabine chose to live at school
When Sabine Walton enrolled at a boarding school in Normanhurst three years ago almost all the girls in her shared dorm room were from the state’s north-west.
“Our family home is in the city, so I definitely stood out among the boarders who are mostly from farms and regional towns,” says Sabine, whose family home is in Dulwich Hill, about a 50-minute drive in peak hour from the all-girls private school.
“It was daunting at first. I definitely could have been a day girl, but boarding saves so much time commuting,” she says.
The year 10 student at Loreto Normanhurst in Sydney’s north-west is one of about 5900 boarding students across the state. They include about 1000 students whose families are from metropolitan areas but are enrolled in boarding schools.
Australian Boarding Schools Association chief executive Richard Stokes said city-dwelling parents who opt to send their children to boarding school – either as weekly or full-time boarders – are attracted by the lack of travel time and the extra academic support that schools can provide with supervised study time.
“Especially in year 11 and 12, boarding provides great structure for kids and that study time with tutors or homework helpers,” he said.
Across Australia there are about 20,490 boarding students and, while the number of boarding schools has grown from about 150 a decade ago to about 200 last year, enrolments have remained consistent since 2012. The impact of the pandemic meant international boarding student numbers halved and are yet to recover, said Stokes.
“International students are just not returning as energetically as we would have hoped,” he said, adding that three boarding schools in Victoria and Tasmania were forced to close in the past three years when overseas students disappeared.
There are 47 boarding schools in NSW, most being high-fee private schools that charge up to about $73,000 for boarding and tuition at schools such as Kambala and King’s. At the co-educational Red Bend Catholic College, in the state’s Central West, fees are about $25,000 to board in the senior school.
The NSW state president of the Isolated Children’s Parents’? Association, Tanya Mitchell, said the cost of boarding school was now “out of the realms” of what most families could afford.
Mitchell said of three public boarding schools in regional NSW, which generally charge about $13,000 for the year, two are co-educational and one is an academically selective all-boys school in the state’s north-west. “Especially for families from the north-west of the state, there are no public all-girls boarding options. And some fees are making it difficult if families want or need a boarding option.
“Families are telling us they really would like that public all-girls boarding school option,” she said.
But in Sydney, schools including Loreto Normanhurst and Knox Grammar, both of which charge upwards of $60,000 for tuition and boarding, principals claim that demand for living on campus is on the rise. At Loreto, where there are about 200 boarders, the school is planning a $130 million redevelopment as part of its 30-year master plan that will include a new four-storey boarding house.
Knox Grammar principal Scott James said most boarders at the all-boys school were from rural NSW or overseas. “Even though boarding is declining in some countries, there is still demand from parents, and from families with current day students wanting to change to boarding,” he said. “It generally reflects the busyness of parents.”
All-boys St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill was a boarding-only school until about 25 years ago, with more than 900 students, principal Michael Blake said. “With numbers declining, the school began to enrol day boys to remain viable. The school now opens to day students with extracurricular activities until 8pm,” he said.
About half of the 1000 students at St Joseph’s are boarders, many from Dubbo, Hunters Hill, Tamworth, Gladesville and Mudgee. “But there are boarders from Hunters Hill too ... there are some whose bed at home is less than 100 metres from their bed in the dorms,” Blake said.
When Sabine started at Loreto in year 7, she was just one of two boarders who were from the city. “We now have girls from the Central Coast area, and even the inner city from Roseville and Paddington.”
“I enjoy having the independence; the only downside is homesickness, but I go home most weekends, which makes it easier,” she said.
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21 May, 2023
School System’s Decision Against Flying ‘Pride’ Flags Outside Buildings Angers LGBTQ+ Activists
LGBTQ+ protesters gather April 27 in front of the Westwood Regional school board in Bergen County, New Jersey, to complain about a policy allowing only the U.S. and state flags to be flown outside schools. (Photo: screenshot of livestream)
School board meetings in one New Jersey district have turned into a toxic fiasco as LGBTQ+ protesters screamed and cursed at board members over a policy to fly only the American and New Jersey flags in front of schools.
The last two scheduled school board meetings of the Westwood Regional School District in Bergen County, New Jersey, erupted into controversy because the policy excludes the outdoor display of rainbow flags and other banners of the LGBTQ+ movement, along with all other types of flags.
Protesters accused the school board of using the policy to attack the LGBTQ+ community, since it bans flying the “Pride” or “Progress Pride” flags from flagpoles outside schools, as several other government buildings in New Jersey do.
School board members responded that the policy prohibits all flags except the American and New Jersey flags, not just flags associated with the LGBTQ+ movement, which includes transgenderism.
“I don’t want any special-interest flag flown over a government building,” board member Laura Cooper told the crowd April 27.
However, no board policy states that teachers may not fly flags of their choice in their classrooms, or that students may not display the Pride or Progress Pride flags on their backpacks or clothing throughout the day.
Four hours into the school board’s April 27 meeting, former board member Andrea Gerstmayr called out Cooper for “not looking” at her as Gerstmayr criticized the flag policy.
“I would like to say that nobody on the board should ever criticize nor undermine [a student’s] words when she says that she needs the Pride flag to feel safe,” Gerstmayr said, “or any LGBTQ+ child needs to know when it is flown outside of a building, Ms. Cooper—Ms. Cooper …”
Gerstmayr began chastising Cooper for “not giving me the respect” of attention while she spoke, although it appears from a video of the meeting that Cooper was writing something down.
“You need to look at me when I am—” began Gerstmayr, before she was cut off by board President Michael Pontillo, who informed her that she wasn’t allowed to directly address board members and asked that she take her seat.
Gerstmayr refused, waving her arms as she exclaimed, “She should look at me. I can talk.”
Pontillo responded: “You’re not supposed to address board members directly, Andrea, you would know that—you were a board member. It’s actually in the rules, so you can have a seat. Thank you.”
Gerstmayr persisted, shouting: “No, I am standing here and I am going to say what I’m going to say.”
Pontillo then asked a police officer to escort Gerstmayr from the lectern. As many in the crowd yelled or booed, Pontillo said, “We have rules, folks.”
When the crowd began to become unruly, shouting obscenities at the board, Pontillo requested that Gerstmayr finish her statement without distractions.
But Gerstmayr continued to complain, saying that Cooper appeared to be on her phone. Several other board members, looking exasperated, informed Gerstmayr that Cooper clearly was taking notes.
Gerstmayr abandoned her criticism of Cooper’s note-taking, asking the board why U.S. embassies fly the [Pride] flag, if the American flag is a symbol of pride and unity:
Why do U.S. embassies fly the [Pride] flag? To show our citizens around the world that they are a safe haven, for anyone to come and come to the embassy to know that they are safe. And that is what our LGBTQ children need to know, that when they see this flag outside flown on—doesn’t have to be the same mast as the one as the United States flag, but to know that they are safe. They need the symbol.
The May 11 school board meeting descended into more chaos, as the board adopted the flag policy and several speakers used the public comment segment to air grievances.
May 11, 2023, Westwood Regional School District Board Meeting
Sharon McDonough, an administrative assistant for the Westwood Regional School District, wore a Progress Pride flag in her hair as she began her remarks by telling the students present that the district’s classrooms were safe spaces for them.
McDonough then turned around and accused board member Douglas Cusato of telling others to “go f— themselves” when she asked him to wear a mask in 2020.
Many protesters at the May 11 meeting also accused the school board of “dehumanizing an entire community of people,” as one speaker put it, because it appointed a committee to examine the district’s sex education policy and to determine whether teachers may promote LGBTQ+ topics in elementary classrooms.
One student told the school board this was “gross overreach.” She said the board needed to “listen to experts” and review “peer-reviewed studies” in order to determine policy.
“It feels like you are using your own beliefs and agendas to push a prejudicial and discriminatory viewpoint on this district,” the student said.
Another speaker, who identified himself as a teacher, suggested a scenario at a local carnival in which a student asks him whether “someone can have two moms.”
“What would you say?” the teacher asked the board. He then began repeating the word “empathy” into the microphone as a small crowd behind him waved Pride and Progress flags.
However, no proposed or adopted policy in Westwood Regional School District prohibits teachers from mentioning spouses or parents who are in either straight or gay relationships.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/17/lgbtq-activists-protest-new-jersey-schools-flag-policy
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DeSantis Signs Bill Curtailing Diversity Programs at Public Colleges
This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law to curtail spending on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at the state’s public colleges.
The law, S.B. 266, prohibits public colleges from using federal or state funds on diversity programs, which DeSantis described as “discriminatory initiatives” that divide students.
“Florida has ranked number one in higher education for seven years in a row, and by signing this legislation we are ensuring that Florida’s institutions encourage diversity of thought, civil discourse, and the pursuit of truth for generations to come,” DeSantis said in a statement. “Florida is taking a stand for empowering students, parents, and educators to focus on creating opportunities for our younger generations. I am happy to have worked with the legislature to get this important legislation signed, sealed, and delivered.”
In remarks at the bill signing, DeSantis said that college staffers feel like they “walk on eggshells” and “don’t have the freedom to speak their minds” on campuses.
“For us, with our tax dollars, we want to focus on the classical mission on what a university is supposed to be. We don’t want to be diverted to a lot of these niche subjects that are heavily politicized. We want to focus on the basics,” DeSantis said.
“Universities should be on the hook for the student loans,” he added, pointing out that many of the “woke” majors offered at colleges and universities do not make students employable after graduation.
“If that were the case, they [the schools] would make sure that their curriculum was really fit to be productive for the students when they graduated,” he explained. “We’re going to have traditional education. We want courses and majors that have high return on investment.”
“Some of these niche subjects, like Critical Race Theory, other types of DEI-infused courses and majors – Florida’s getting out of that game. If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley,” he said.
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Grand buildings are no substitute for genuine scholarship at our universities
A symbol of what is wrong with today’s universities is the new building at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, opened last week.
Costing $250m, and taking five years to construct, this gleaming white 12-storey edifice towers over its neighbouring Victorian-era suburb of Fitzroy like a graceless box-shaped Taj Mahal, but in this case named after St Theresa of Kolkata.
The student facilities inside are of plush five-star quality, with generous workspaces and airy lounges set among internal gardens and external terraces, offering spectacular views over the city. So, what is the problem?
The top priority of a university, as a teaching and research institution, should be the quality of its academic staff. Where excellence is valued and privileged over everything else, morale is likely to be high, books and articles influential, teaching inspiring, and departments and faculties can be pretty much left to look after themselves.
Yet it is hard to discern any serious concern with excellence from vice-chancellors, their deputies and deans, over the past 25 years, especially in arts and humanities faculties – apart, that is, from mantras vented in rhetorical mission statements.
This has been the era of the hollowing out of departments, in wave after wave of retrenchment. Tenured lecturers and professors have been replaced by low-paid casual staff, usually part-time lecturers and tutors.
Concurrently, the traditional lecture has been abandoned, with students shifting to online learning, partly by choice but also with encouragement.
Less and less actual attendance at the campus has meant that real tutorials and seminars, in which actual teachers conduct discussions, are starting to look like anachronisms from a long-distant past. In a virtual university, fewer staff are needed.
The waves of retrenchment have been conducted with one aim in view – cost efficiency. The once-upon-a-time collegiate, imbued with a centuries-old humanist ethos, has morphed into an industry like any other, obeying a value-free logic, as if to vindicate the Marxist caricatures of capitalism that humanities disciplines have increasingly purveyed to students over the past 40 years.
I haven’t seen one instance of discrimination along the lines that there are some staff we can’t afford to let go, on the grounds of their research and teaching excellence. To give one example with which I’m familiar, of a smallish Humanities department that had one senior staff member with a well-justified, high international reputation – and who was the intellectual soul of the department, and a gifted teacher. He was encouraged to retire early as if he were no different from some lazy hack, of no greater benefit to the university than a first-year tutor on half his salary.
Administrators seemed to have no conception of mediocrity, including the depressing effect of uninspired and uninterested lecturers on students. I hope I’m wrong here, and there have been odd exceptions to this rankly unprofessional behaviour from top university management.
As a somewhat absurd comparison, I remember being told decades ago when I was a postgraduate student at Cambridge University that if you wanted to find the Nobel prize winners then look in tin shacks along the river, as you wouldn’t meet them dining leisurely at college high tables. Admittedly, the nature of scientific research has changed since those days, but the lesson remains. In any creative area, the rigours of producing the best work are formidable and unrelenting.
The ACU has announced, coinciding with the opening of its Melbourne Taj Mahal, that it needs to cut at least 110 full-time jobs. It is facing a reported $30m deficit.
The deficit is not just due to building largesse. The ACU is also faced with plunging enrolments – 30 per cent in humanities’ students at the Melbourne campus – making one speculate about white elephants. Indeed, humanities enrolments are in decline around the Western world, partly due to the pall of boredom spread by over-politicised curriculums – who wants to hear about Jane Austen’s passing, obscure concern about slavery at the expense of her magisterial displaying of characters suffering the vicissitudes of life!
Sociologists call it conspicuous consumption. The executive invests its hopes and its pride in opulent campus palaces, with office suites at the top, reminiscent of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt beneath him.
It is allied to the fact that in recent decades, university administrations have relentlessly expanded their tiers of management. The manager has replaced the professor as the key figure in the institution. Lip-service these days, at best, is paid to professorial boards, which once were influential.
Over the past century, university employment has swung from a ratio of 20 per cent administrative and 80 per cent academic, to about 55 per cent non-academic today. The real work of the university – teaching and research – is now being carried out by a diminishing, largely underpaid minority, overseen by a large bureaucracy.
To be fair to the ACU, its current projected staff cuts are non-academic. I have some sympathy for any vice-chancellor today who wants to improve the quality of his or her academic staff. This is difficult to achieve.
It would take Jeff Kennett’s determination, via the appointment of ruthless deans with the will to clear out dead wood and make new appointments according to international merit, overriding the political and disciplinary biases of those many existing staff who traditionally control appointments committees.
It would also mean culling the expansive ranks of deputy and pro-vice chancellors, and those under them, cutting back building budgets and creating new first-rank research and teaching centres.
The online university is cruel to students. It destroys student life. A physical campus, with teaching buildings intermixed with cafes, squares, shops, and libraries, provides places for students to gather together with their fellows, catch up, and discuss classes.
The ACU perhaps had this in mind, in providing a luxurious, very comfortable building to attract students into the campus. But the thinking is consumerist, as in drawing people to a picturesque shopping centre.
In universities that are functioning rightly, students are drawn to classes where there is some charisma, where the intellectual content is engaging; attracted by lectures where there is the seriousness that what they are studying really matters, seminars in which there is heated discussion of ideas.
In these universities, the teachers, and at all levels, reign supreme, even when their classes are held in tin shacks up the River Cam.
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18 May, 2023
Adding Sikhs to the Curriculum
I have had Sikhs around my life since childhood and have always had a good impression of them. I remember in my early teens how a tall dignified brown man in a blue turban gave me a tract about Guru Nanak (founder of Sikhism). It was published by the Gurpurb publishing company, a name which I have never been able to forget. I read the tract. I say more in praise of Sikhs here. See below a picture of some Sikhs in the presence of a well-known Christian gentleman
Despite the large theological, geographic, and observable differences between Sikhism and Islam, Sikh populations in the United States have experienced suspicion, discrimination, and even violence ever since the Islamist terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, an advocacy organization for Sikh Americans—called the Sikh Coalition—formed to combat discrimination and to advocate for religious liberty.
Discrimination and prejudice against Sikhs has persisted in the two decades since then: On Aug. 5, 2012, a lone gunman and known white supremacist opened fire at a Sikh house of worship in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing seven. The next year, on the anniversary of the shooting, the FBI approved a recommendation from its Advisory Policy Board to collect statistics on hate crimes against Sikhs. In 2015, the FBI began tracking anti-Sikh bias motivation in its hate crime statistics, along with bias against Mormons, Orthodox and “other” Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.The FBI released a supplement to its 2021 Hate Crimes Statistics report, its most recent compilation, in March of this year (the report defines hate crimes “as a criminal offense that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a person based on race, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, disability, gender, and gender identity”).
In a statement announcing the release of the supplement, the FBI said that of the nearly 1,600 hate crimes motivated by religion, 11.6% were anti-Sikh—the second-highest, after anti-Jewish incidents, which accounted for the majority. Indeed, the bureau’s Crime Data Exploration tool shows that the eighth-highest bias behind all hate crimes in 2021 was anti-Sikh motivation (214 incidents)—just below anti-Jewish (324) and anti-Asian hate crime (305), and higher than incidents of the kind of targeted violence that tends to garner more popular attention, such as against transgender (176), Arab (75), and Muslim (96) individuals. According to the CDE data, the number of anti-Sikh hate crimes has roughly doubled year over year since 2019, when 54 reported incidents were recorded, and 2020, which recorded 89.
But as Sikh populations continue to grow in various areas of the country, the Sikh Coalition has had success lobbying states to integrate information about Sikhs into their school curricula, as part of an effort to familiarize their neighbors with both their faith and their contributions to American society.
A five-minute video on the Sikh Coalition’s YouTube channel called “Who are the Sikhs?” is a short primer on how Sikhs are often identifiable by their names (Singh and Kaur are names given to initiated Sikhs, to men and women respectively, to help promote equality), and by visible religious symbols like turbans and beards. The video, produced in collaboration with the Fresno County Office of Education, also includes Sikh history in California, which began over a century ago when Sikhs began immigrating to the developing American West, mostly from the Indian state of Punjab, and eventually emerged as key movers in California’s agriculture and railroad industries.
In December 2022, the Sikh Coalition added Utah and Mississippi to its list of states that have incorporated Sikh awareness into their school curricula, bringing the total to 16 in over a decade-and-a-half of working with policymakers and communities. Their goal is to reach students in all 50 states.
“Sikhism is the fifth-largest major world religion,” said Harman Singh, senior education manager for the Sikh Coalition. “But Sikhs and our historical contributions are largely absent from state educational standards.” The Sikh Coalition, he said, is “16 for 16” in terms of states they have engaged, all of which have subsequently integrated Sikhism into their curricula.
Utah and Mississippi may seem like surprising early adopters of the Sikh social studies curricula. While neither Mississippi’s Department of Education nor Utah’s Board of Education could provide race or ethnicity data reflecting the size of their states’ Sikh student bodies, both states have substantial Sikh populations. Today, the U.S. Census Bureau shows that Mississippi’s Punjabi-speaking population near its capital, Jackson, is as high as in some areas of California’s Central Valley, where the first Sikh house of worship was established in Stockton in 1912. (Punjabi speaking is not a one-to-one correlation with Sikhism, but can serve as an indication of a Sikh population in the absence of census data on religion, which the Census Bureau does not collect.) Today, there are two gurdwaras, Sikh houses of worship, in Jackson, and one in Tupelo, Mississippi. Common estimates put the U.S.-wide Sikh population at about 500,000.
Mississippi’s current social studies educational standards now include in its minority studies elective course objectives: “Examine social and political factors and events that have impacted attitudes and discrimination towards immigrants and religious communities (e.g., American Muslims, Hispanic Americans, West Indian Americans, Sikh Americans, American Hindus, American Jews, etc.).”
According to Sharon Turner, director of public affairs for the Utah State Board of Education, the inclusion of Sikhs in the state’s sixth grade standards of instruction, covering the origins and key tenets of major world religions, reflects the board’s conscientious effort to have a “pretty diverse representation of religions.” Turner said Sikhs are an important—and growing—part of the state’s increasing population. A study by the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah found that population growth in the state in 2022 was driven primarily by net migration into the state, which the study authors attributed to the easing of pandemic restrictions and a robust economy within the state.
“These victories in Utah and Mississippi represent years of careful and tireless work by community members and advocates at the Sikh Coalition to ensure that our children see themselves reflected in their curricula,” said Simran Jeet Singh, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program, and author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life, in an email to Tablet. The Aspen Institute’s Religion & Society Program is dedicated to leveraging religion to address social inequities and encourage social cohesion in a pluralistic society. “Sikhs are at once highly visible, in part due to our articles of faith, yet also unknown to so many Americans,” he said. “Starting with more inclusive education earlier should help to combat some prejudices and ignorance in the next generation. Educating our students about all religions in a constitutionally appropriate manner will help combat bullying and bias and will help prepare all kids to grow up and thrive in a diverse society.”
Sikh founder Guru Nanak eschewed the Islam and Hinduism that surrounded him in 15th-century Punjab—where he was born in 1469—and developed his own theological system, in writings that today form the basis of Sikh scripture. Nanak was to be the first of 10 consecutive gurus (a reverential term meaning “enlightener”), who over time developed the canon of Sikh scripture and spiritual disciplines, as well as a rite of initiation into the Sikh community, also known as the Khalsa, for individuals who are committed to strict, orthodox adherence to those disciplines.
Khalsa members make a commitment to the “Five Ks,” or the visible and tangible elements of Sikh adherence. The Sikh Coalition guide says those are: “kesh (unshorn hair), kanga (small comb), kara (steel bracelet), kirpan (religious article resembling a knife), and kachera (soldier-shorts).” Turbans, although perhaps the most easily identifiable external sign of Sikh membership, are not part of the Five Ks. Sikhs who are not members of the Khalsa are free to adopt whichever of the signs they like.
Likening them to wearing a wedding ring, the Sikh Coalition states: “The five articles of faith signify an individual’s commitment to Sikhi and to the highest ideals of love and service to humanity. They serve as an external uniform that unifies Sikhs and binds them to the beliefs of the religion, and they are a daily reminder that Sikhs must live an honest, moral, kind, brave, and loving life.”
The last of the 10 gurus, Guru Bogind Singh, died in 1708, which Sikhs believe marks the end of the faith’s human leaders and established the authority of the Eternal Guru, called the Guru Granth Sahib, which is the teachings found in the Sikh scriptures themselves. The Guru Granth Sahib’s contents are primarily verse poetry written in various languages, which are often sung. Central to many Sikh rituals, it often occupies a throne within a gurdwara.
Harman Singh of the Sikh Coalition said that he finds the most obvious things people have a question about are the outward devotional symbols. “The external and the internal are both the same for the Sikh, in terms of what those articles of faith represent,” he said. He cites unshorn hair and beards as a sign of acceptance of God’s will, that “God made you the way that they did, and that you should accept that, and recognize the light within you, and trust that that is there for a reason,” whether or not you have hair. He also likens the identifiers to a uniform. He said he often uses the example with young people of being able to identify medical professionals in a hospital as individuals who can help you, by their lab coats or scrubs. Wearing the five articles in public, he said, is an outward display of commitment to living out certain values and fulfilling certain responsibilities. “My turban is literally a part of me,” he said, likening its removal to the removal of a limb. “It’s not just a symbol.”
It is outward signs of devotion that have marked Sikhs as targets for discrimination and violence, especially since 9/11.
Sikh community members were quick to recognize after the attacks that they would be targets for prejudice, Harman Singh said, and the organization was born after a group of Sikhs got on the phone together the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Early initiatives included pro bono legal services for Sikhs who were victims of hate crimes, discrimination, and bullying at school, and policy advocacy to advance Sikh interests and civil rights for minority groups.
Harman Singh experienced this abrupt cultural sea change firsthand. “I was born and raised in Michigan,” he said, where he and his brother were the only Sikhs at their school. As an eighth grader who wore a turban, “my whole world shifted overnight,” he said. “The experience I had on September 10th was very different than it was on September 12th.” Singh said he experienced bullying and hate for days, months, and years to come. Growing up after 9/11, he said he checked the index in his social studies textbooks every year to see if Sikhs appeared. They never did, and, he noted, “I never had an opportunity to educate my classmates about my religion, about my community.”
In 2009, New Jersey became the first state to include Sikhism in its state social studies standards, after six years of advocacy from both the Sikh Coalition and New Jersey Sikhs.
“The most common problem in covering anti-Sikh violence is the framework of ‘mistaken identity,’” a Sikh Coalition media guide reads. “This framework is problematic because it implies that there is a ‘correct’ identity group that ought to be targeted. No community should be targeted.”
“Ignorance breeds animosity,” Harman Singh said. “And one of the best ways to keep students safe is through developing social studies standards, and teaching about not just the Sikh community, but many diverse communities as early as possible, because when we left children to kind of create and come up with their own understandings of what these different communities represent, they’re all going to default to what they see on social media, popular culture, and on the news. And unfortunately, oftentimes turbans and beards and brown skin, is often associated with terror, and so those are the assumptions that a lot of times people make at a very young age in this country, and that often unfortunately, leads to hate into adulthood.” He said internal surveys conducted by the Sikh Coalition have determined that over two-thirds of turbaned Sikh students report being bullied in school.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/adding-sikhs-school-curriculum
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Colorado School District Hosts Drag Show Amid Teachers Union Embrace of Gender Ideology
On April 5, teachers from Colorado’s Eagle County School District filled the Vilar Performing Arts Center with third, fourth and fifth graders to see Muse, an acrobatic performance by the theatrical troupe Flip Fabrique.
The performance was just one among the Vilar’s 2022-2023 STARS series lineup, the product of a partnership between the facility and the school district intended to provide “an array of performing arts genres from dance and theater to world music” to Eagle County students. Eagle County parents trust and expect STARS performances to be positive, educational experiences for their children. The description of Muse, however, should have raised red flags.
“What does it mean to be a woman?” the flier asked. “There’s hardly one answer, and exploring the question calls for some acrobatics … Get ready to see powerful women, graceful men and every permutation in between.” Just vague enough to masquerade as a children’s show, this language didn’t do the performance justice. Muse, rated for children aged eight and above, focused on an adult male transitioning to a female and featured provocatively dressed men performing sexual dances for an audience full of children.
Young audience members were clearly disturbed. One student expressed his concern by interrupting the show: “This is wrong,” he cried. “Don’t you know we’re in third grade?”
Parental consent for this school sponsored field trip was assumed and covered under a blanket permission slip that authorized student attendance to all STARS performances throughout the year. Parents were rightly shocked and disgusted after their children were exposed to an explicit drag show veiled as an educational performance. During an Eagle County School District Board of Education meeting just days later, one parent labeled the performance “an attack on our children,” and a symptom of a larger issue in an increasingly left-leaning America.
Eagle County Superintendent Philip Qualman claimed he was unaware of the show’s content and was notified by the Vilar’s executive director that Muse “lightly addressed themes of gender.” In response, Qualman drafted a letter to parents that required opt-in consent for their children to attend future performances. Somehow, however, the letter was never delivered to principals or parents. Qualman concluded with an “unequivocal apology” for exposing students to “controversial content.”
Meanwhile, an Eagle County LGBT group, Mountain Pride, doubled down on the event, claiming that exposure to gender ideology is an “important” part of elementary education. Artistic performances like Muse “literally save lives,” according to the organization’s executive director. Mountain Pride did not elaborate on how men dancing sexually in front of young children was lifesaving.
Unfortunately, Eagle County’s explicit field trip was not an isolated incident in the State of Colorado. In February, the Jefferson County Education Association hosted a “family friendly” Drag Bingo Happy Hour that featured alcoholic beverages and drag performer Shirley Delta Blow, also known as third grade teacher Stuart Sanks. Due to significant backlash from the Jefferson County community, several adults stood outside of the event, using rainbow umbrellas to block the public’s view of what was going on behind closed doors.
Last June, four elementary schools in Colorado teamed up to support a “drag queen story time” again featuring Shirley Delta Blow.
Public schools across the country continue to expose children to sexual content through drag performances, graphic “children’s books” and gender ideology discussions inappropriate to the students’ grade level. Make no mistake – teachers’ unions are complicit, particularly in Colorado. In a statement last year, the Colorado Education Association (CEA) applauded the Colorado State Board of Education’s decision to “fully incorporate marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ individuals, in its Social Studies standards.”
In response, CEA president Amie Baca-Oehlert said she could “breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our students will have access to an honest and inclusive education in our public schools in Colorado.” In another statement, Baca-Oehlert blamed Colorado teacher shortages on the fact that teachers “aren’t trusted to teach in age-appropriate way and teach appropriate content.”
With events like these, it is no wonder that parents are losing faith in the American public school system. Teachers’ unions, as well as educators, parents, and legislators, have a joint responsibility to create schools that are healthy and productive for children. Instead, unions like the CEA encourage a failing public school system that is willing to expose children to explicit content time and time again.
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Australia: Parents opt for religious schools as student enrolments soar
Enrolments in private schools across Australia have grown by 35 per cent over the past decade, fuelled by a surge in student numbers in Islamic and Christian schools.
Independent enrolments increased to 688,638 last year, according to official data released in a report by private school lobby group Independent Schools Australia.
Principals say parents are attracted to private schools due to the perception they offer more disciplined learning environments or are seeking out religious schools because they like the values.
Islamic school enrolments doubled to 46,278 between 2012 and 2022 while Christian schools grew by 50 per cent to 82,779 over the same period. Enrolments in non-religious private schools also grew by 38 per cent to 100,067 students.
Independent Catholic schools were one of just two affiliations whose enrolments fell. Systemic Catholic schools, which charge low fees and are run by dioceses around the country, were not included in the report.
The total share of students attending private schools went from 4.1 per cent in 1970 to 17.1 per cent of pupils by last year.
Helen Proctor, a professor of education at the University of Sydney, said parents in the 1970s simply sent their child to the local public or Catholic school. Now they were anxious about their child’s education because a university course was a prerequisite for most entry level white-collar jobs.
“School choice seems to be the thing which parents can actively do to alleviate that,” she said.
She said an increase in federal government funding for private schools over several decades had made them more affordable while parents perceived they offered a better quality education.
“There is a belief that if you pay for something, it is going to be better. It is a bit of a myth, but it has been a long-term belief,” she said.
She said teacher shortages of recent years could be one factor that had driven more parents from the public system.
“There are critical shortages of teachers, and they’ve hit public schools particularly in certain areas very hard,” she said.
Independent Schools Australia chief executive Graham Catt said part of the reason for the growth was because parents had sought out schools that could administer remote learning effectively.
“From 2020 to 2022, in the pandemic, we do know one of the drivers of that growth was the ability of independent schools to adopt and pivot,” he said.
Christian Schools Australia director of public policy Mark Spencer said parents were attracted to the values-based education on offer.
“They are those who are described as Howard’s battlers, Tony’s tradies or the silent Australians – they’re ordinary suburban mums and dads, a tradie dad with a mother who is working part-time in office or retail,” he said.
“We have those sorts of parents, we also have parents from ethnic migrant backgrounds, we have a lot of applications from Islamic parents because we provide a values-based education they find attractive.”
The report said in the 2020-21 financial year, the average public school student was allocated $20,940 in total government funding, compared to $12,260 for private school students.
“Governments save an estimated $5.7 billion in funding due to the contribution from families and other private sources,” the report said. The average annual fee for a private school was $5272, well below Australia’s most expensive school, Kambala in Rose Bay, which charges $46,300 per year for year 12.
The Demographics Group demographer Simon Kuestenmacher predicted enrolments in private schools would continue to grow, largely thanks to the hundreds of thousands of people who migrated to Australia every year. However, he warned demand may be tempered by parents reconsidering private education simply because more of their cash was tied up in paying a huge mortgage in Sydney or Melbourne.
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17 May, 2023
Maryland School District Permits Students to Carry Narcan on Campus Amid Shocking Rise in Youth Fentanyl Overdoses
In a decisive response to the escalating opioid crisis affecting the young population, Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland have sanctioned the carriage of Narcan, a life-saving opioid antagonist, on school premises.
This new regulation, signed into effect on May 1, permits students to possess “personally obtained” Narcan, an emergency medication that reverses the deadly effects of an opioid overdose.
During this year alone, there have been 15 instances where Narcan was dispensed to students in Montgomery County. This grim statistic sheds light on the urgent necessity for such a policy.
The Community Engagement Officer, Captain Jordan Satinsky, in conversation with WTOP News, a Maryland and DC-based news service, highlighted the perilous trend of fentanyl’s increased presence in drugs.
The youth, he stated, are not oblivious to this fact. However, they might underestimate its lethal potential. “They just don’t understand that it’s almost like Russian roulette.”, he said.
In a press conference held the previous month, Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones pointed out a worrying trend. While adult overdoses in the region are witnessing a decline, a stark contrast is visible in the rising numbers of juvenile overdoses.
The Montgomery County Public Safety Committee was presented with startling data in February. According to the committee’s report, adolescent overdoses (under age 21) rose by a shocking 77% in 2022.
Montgomery County witnessed 48 adolescent overdoses in 2022, a significant leap from the 27 cases recorded in 2021.
Battalion Chief Benjamin Kaufman with the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue revealed to WTOP News that the response teams are tackling approximately 60 opiate overdoses monthly. This figure encompasses all ages and locations, not merely schools.
In an effort to alleviate fears about carrying Narcan at school, Dr. Patricia Kapunan, medical officer, issued a message. “If they are carrying Narcan in school, we want to let them know that they’re not going to get in trouble for that,” Dr. Kapunan said.
Elena Suarez, a grieving mother whose 19-year-old daughter succumbed to an overdose, issued a potent warning about the omnipresence of fentanyl in today’s drugs. She stated, “What you leave behind is a web of grief, and a life sentence for your families and your loved ones.”
Despite repeated attempts, Montgomery County Public Schools have yet to respond to requests for comments from the Daily Caller News Foundation, thus leaving some questions unanswered about the policy’s broader implications.
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British universities are beyond redemption
There’s no doubt that the government has the best of intentions when it comes to clearing up the Augean stables of UK higher education: witness its setting up of the Office for Students to protect students’ interests against ever-more monolithic university management, and more recently this year’s Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act aimed at safeguarding the interests of both students and staff.
However, all this leaves a much more awkward issue: what are we actually promoting? True, it’s the done thing for middle-class 18-year-olds to be sent away to university. True too that you still need a degree to obtain certain kinds of well-paid jobs. But these aside, why should anyone want to go to a UK university – or if they do choose higher education, to go here rather than somewhere else? It’s a question worth taking seriously.
Up to about thirty years ago, the spirit of the post-war years was still recognisable in most UK universities. If you were seriously interested in a subject, you got contact ad lib with a community of seriously keen and well-informed scholars. You also had the opportunity to learn for yourself (and a realisation that this was up to you; if you didn’t make the effort you’d do badly), and the prospect that, in contrast to the world outside, intellectual prowess and cleverness would be nurtured and recognised.
In addition, you got a reasonable social life. If you were lucky, there would be glimmerings of social graces (useful if you came from a background where they were regarded as unimportant) and an atmosphere where you could say, to all intents and purposes, what you liked and a realisation that others would give as good as they got.
There is a strong argument that a good number of our universities should be gently allowed to die
Some of this you may still get, at least at Oxbridge and a few other elite institutions. There is also, to be fair, some advantage in later earnings (the so-called graduate premium), though this has gone down markedly in the last ten years and depends very much on your subject: medicine at Cambridge or law at Bristol are very different matters from fashion studies or journalism at some provincial ex-polytechnic.
But this aside, the atmosphere facing most modern students is pretty uninspiring. A recent Twitter thread from a final year student at the University of Edinburgh put into perspective the sorry state of many UK universities: ‘This week I was told that due to industrial action, my 10k word dissertation will probably not be marked…ever.’ This is due to disruption caused by ongoing strikes by the UCU, and the university’s response that ‘to allow us to graduate on time, work submitted during the boycott will just not be marked’. In words that ought to disconcert any vice-chancellor, he wondered what he had got out of a course that would give him a degree, but where he was saddled with upwards of £37,000 in debt and where a dissertation he had put his heart into – and taken six months to write – might stand for nothing.
Nor, at most universities, is the intellectual life much to write home about. Academics, once happy to talk to students at most times, are now too busy and post very limited surgery hours on their doors. Some institutions are still providing lectures and seminars online (an unwelcome hangover from the pandemic) giving rise to the quip that UK universities now provide the most expensive streaming service in the world. In teaching, the emphasis is not so much on open-ended discussion of ideas as on ‘learning outcomes’ and gaining ‘transferable skills’: in other words, how to profit best from the education commodity you are buying from an increasingly corporate-minded institution headed by business managers in all but name – who being paid decidedly corporate-minded salaries. And that is before you get to the manic efforts of that same management to push equity, diversity and inclusion, to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum and to make sure reading lists are properly balanced by reference to such intellectually vital matters as the sex and skin colour of the writers.
And outside of academic life? Well, you are increasingly on your own. The ‘student experience’ that institutions assiduously promote largely comes down to garish new buildings, student clubs, gruesome socials and cheap bars. Meanwhile, while the tutorial system, supposedly a copy of the Oxbridge college practice of having an academic keeping a parental eye over every student, is broken, Most academics, who are scandalously underpaid and overworked at the bottom in striking contrast to the prosperous (but largely non-teaching) management at the top, have neither the time nor the ability to arrange for it. This can have disastrous results: there have been a number of well-publicised cases where parents have relied on assurances that universities will look after the interests of their children, only to find little done, with predictable effects on physical and mental health. This has, in far too many cases, led to suicides by students abandoned by a system that should have offered them help.
There is a strong argument that many of our universities are now beyond redemption and that a good number of them should be gently allowed to die. It’s also arguable that if they do, we should replace them with a new kind of slimmed-down institution more typical of much of European practice: one limited to providing libraries, lecture-rooms and scholars for students with a desire to learn. But these could be non-residential campuses which are not claiming to provide advice or welfare, and with none of the other pretensions of the corporate behemoths that too many universities have become.
But that is for the future. At present, the best advice for aspiring 18-year-olds might seem, to some, controversial. If you look closely at a particular department in a university and really want to spend three years there, feel free. Otherwise, remember that most degrees don’t guarantee a decent life at university or a good job after it – and choose to do something else. A year abroad could well be better for you. It will certainly cost you a great deal less, even if you do fly business both ways.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/british-universities-are-beyond-redemption/
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UK: Sacked Christian primary school teacher taking legal action against council after she was dismissed for refusing to use eight-year-old pupil's trans pronouns
A Christian primary school teacher who was sacked after refusing to use a pupil's trans pronouns is taking legal action against the council for unfair dismissal and religious discrimination.
The teacher told The Telegraph that the school had helped the eight-year-old girl transition into a boy two years earlier, demanding that staff use the child's preferred male pronouns and male name.
The primary-school pupil was also allowed to use the boys' toilets and dressing rooms, according to the now dismissed teacher, which became a significant concern for her.
The teacher, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child, said that she raised concerns for the eight-year-old's welfare, in line with the whistleblowing policy, but was rebuffed by the school.
The school advised the teacher in writing that they would be removing the child from her class, 'to safeguard him from any potential harm', according to the teacher's employment tribunal claim.
The Christian teacher, who is now working in a sandwich shop since her dismissal, claimed she was given a warning that acting on her 'personal beliefs' could be a 'direct breach of GDPR and an act of direct discrimination'.
She has now been forced to take legal action against Nottinghamshire County Council, which runs the school, for alleged unfair dismissal.
She added that the school put her on suspension and under disciplinary investigation for her alleged 'ongoing refusal to follow a management instruction'.
After the suspension was lifted, the teacher agreed with the school to limit her encounters with the child and to avoid using any specific pronouns when addressing the eight-year-old, should she have any contact.
But in fear of the child's welfare, the teacher once again raised her concerns, explaining that the gender transition had the risk of causing detrimental effects on the child's health and welfare.
Her concerns were struck down by the school's governors and the local authority.
The teacher claimed that she was sacked for gross misconduct after sharing details that identified the child with her lawyers while preparing for a judicial review claim against the school and the council.
She alleged that the school viewed this as an alleged confidentiality breach, reporting her to the Teacher Regulation Agency, which could result in her facing a lifelong ban from her profession.
The teacher told the Telegraph: 'Teachers are being bullied not to question trans-affirming policies when evidence shows that the actual result of the approach is to put the welfare of children at serious risk'
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, which is supporting the teacher's case, told the Telegraph: 'This story exposes the confusion and untruths being embedded in primary schools which are developing into a public health crisis.
'The Department for Education must look closely at this case and take appropriate action to protect teachers, who often hold Christian beliefs on these issues, from being hounded out of the profession for opposing or even questioning transgender ideology.'
A Department for Education spokesman said: 'We do not comment on individual cases.
'The Education Secretary is working closely with the Minister for Women and Equalities to provide guidance for schools in this area, based on the overriding principle of the wellbeing and safeguarding of children.
'We expect schools to carefully consider their approach to these matters, to ensure that they take the right decision from the point of view of safeguarding children, accounting for parents' views and those of medical experts where relevant.'
Nottinghamshire County Council did not respond to the Telegraph's request for comment.
The employment tribunal is expected to hear the claim in August.
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16 May, 2023
How Middlebury College Landed in Court Over the Cancellation of a Former Governor of Vermont and His Gift of a Chapel
Last year I related in the Sun how I was skipping my 50th reunion at Middlebury College because of an indignity visited upon one of my predecessors as governor of Vermont. Now I’ve taken the College to court, in an effort to right the wrong done to Governor John Mead.
In late 2021, Middlebury abruptly removed the name “Mead Memorial Chapel” from the house of worship generously furnished by Mead, an alumnus and trustee as well as Vermont’s 53rd governor. It’s wrong on many fronts.
The Governor conditioned his gift on using the name Mead Memorial Chapel, the College has reaped enormous benefits from the Chapel for more than a century, and the cancel culture that led to this act needs to be challenged.
Erasure of Mead’s legacy, based on some remarks in a 1912 speech, is contrary to the College’s policy on free expression and its professed tolerance for unpopular views. It conflicts with the very purpose of an institution of higher learning: to seek knowledge and pursue the truth.
Hence, the filing by the Governor’s estate of a legal challenge. The family has asked me to serve as administrator, and I am honored to accept. I’m confident that a jury, upon examining all the evidence, will recognize the unfairness of this act.
I’ve been gratified by the tremendous support this cause has received from faculty, staff, retirees, and alumni. Many are offended by the unfairness of this act; they recognize the illogic of applying a modern standard to another era.
Mead Memorial Chapel has been the College’s most prominent edifice since 1916. There was no warning that the name would be removed, no public discussion, no hint that such a cancellation was to occur.
Instead, the College issued a statement shortly after the deed was done. It falsely asserted that the Chapel was named for the Governor and his wife; in fact, Governor Mead selected the name to honor his ancestors, among the first settlers of the area.
The basis for the removal of Mead’s name was the Governor’s support for restricting the issuance of marriage licenses to those of limited intellectual capacity and to appoint a commission to study the use of vasectomy as a more humane process of sterilization.
The former practice was passed by the legislature after he left office, but vetoed by his successor. Nonetheless, Mead was proclaimed a eugenicist, and the College implied, without evidence, that he was motivated by racism.
Middlebury’s cancellation of Mead sullies the reputation of a loyal graduate, as well as a generous benefactor. The College exaggerates his role in this matter; he didn’t actually do anything, but merely expressed an opinion.
So the late governor is being punished for his ideas. Middlebury is regulating thought, precisely the opposite of what a liberal arts college should do. Yet Middlebury has benefited from the Chapel extensively since its dedication.
Many campus gatherings have been held there; persons I know have been married in Mead Chapel, and others have been laid to rest following a funeral there. As a student, I attended worship services regularly; sadly, weekly worship no longer occurs.
Middlebury has consistently featured the image of the Chapel in its publications. For it’s the tallest structure on campus and the most distinctive. In 2016, the College website presented a centennial video extolling its value to the College in the previous century.
The College bases its decision to remove the Mead family’s name on inconsistency with its values. Perhaps that’s true: John Mead stood for patriotism, service, family, fairness, education, reverence, and charity. Maybe these are no longer among the values of the institution.
It appears that “presentism” now tops its list: purging someone due to a suggestion that we a century later deem unacceptable. I recently visited Mead’s grave in Rutland, Vermont. On his tombstone is the inscription “A Christian and Philanthropist.” That’s how he wanted to be remembered.
The governor’s gift of Mead Memorial Chapel embodies both attributes. An institution of higher learning is the last place an idea should be canceled. The pursuit of truth and knowledge requires a generous exposure to varied ideas and ideologies. That’s how we prepare students for the future. We must learn from history, not erase it.
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Georgia, Arkansas Revive Old-School Teaching Method: Poetry Recitation. Here’s Why That’s a Good Thing
In his rousing keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala last month, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered an unexpected piece of advice: “Don’t throw away your hard-copy books.”
Unlike digitized books, films, and albums that can be canceled, rewritten, or vanished altogether, physical copies are “the enduring repository that cannot be disappeared.”
With their resurrection of poetry recitation requirements, educators in Georgia and Arkansas are protecting that repository in more ways than one, steeping students in a reality they can affirm, trust, and love.
Both states’ departments of education recently proposed revised K-12 English language arts standards that would require that students recite “all or part of significant poems and speeches as appropriate by grade level,” as the Georgia standards put it.
In stark contrast to ideological curriculums that reduce great words and deeds of the past to matters of identity, power, and will, the recitation of great works of poetry will reacquaint students with the existence of truth, goodness, and beauty, teaching them what no ideology can—namely, how to be at leisure.
If leisure seems a ridiculous object of education to us, that’s in part because it entails a disposition radically different from the habits encouraged by most mainstream institutions today.
Against the incessant barrage of screens, images, and headlines that seems inescapable, leisure requires the silence, space, and attention to apprehend reality. Against the outrage fomented by corporations that profit from division and unrest, leisure celebrates the great gift of human life. And against the urge to self-promote built into every social media platform, leisure demands love.
Hence, while no child needs to be taught how to be outraged or entertained, children must be taught how to occupy their leisure. That has always been the case, as the etymology of the word “school” suggests (schol is the Greek word for leisure), but is especially vital in a day and age in which children—indeed, all Americans—are constantly bombarded by different forms of entertainment totally at odds with genuine leisure.
Carlson captured the challenge well: “As the world becomes more digitized, and people live in [a] realm that’s disconnected from physical reality,” he explained, “the only way to stay sane is to cling more tightly to the things you can smell.”
Poetry recitation primes children for this firm grasp of reality.
To recite a poem, a student must first learn it by heart, which means he or she must not only read it slowly and carefully, but read it aloud, listening closely to its cadence and tone, again and again.
This practice allows one to notice the subtle details we all too often miss when we approach life like an RSS feed, jumping from one meme or short-form video clip to the next, constantly refreshing for new updates and distractions.
To instead sit down with a single poem demands a wakefulness of the soul, a disposition also required for leisure.
As 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper explained, leisure is first and foremost a form of silence that prepares and permits the soul to apprehend or “hear” reality. Reciting a poem entails something similar, drawing the listener into what the acclaimed poet Dana Gioia at the recent National Symposium for Classical Education called a “zone of consciousness” different from one’s normal “zone.”
It also “add[s] an element of pleasure … to learning in any subject,” Gioia explained and vividly conveyed with his own marvelous recitations.
Poetry’s rhyme, meter, and narrative delight students, as does the thrill of performing and even competing with classmates. Students who initially balk at the challenge of committing unfamiliar language to memory and then reciting it before peers soon find the feat exhilarating and even fun, experiencing the festivity inherent in leisure, which traditionally took the form of a religious feast.
Just as in Genesis God contemplates and affirms the goodness of His work after completing it, Pieper noted, “man celebrates and gratefully accepts the reality of creation in leisure.” The reader of poetry models this celebration in an act that simultaneously expresses love and wonder at the world around and beyond us, and relishes the human capacity to do so.
“The very first thing you should do every single day is tell all the people you love that you love them,” Carlson reminded listeners, “because you do, and affirming things out loud makes them real.” Poetry recitation allows students to experience this unity of love and knowledge, and in doing so, it inculcates a love of learning and genuine leisure.
Indeed, poetry recitation introduces students to learning as something one can (and should) pursue for its own sake, rather than as a means to some other end, pushing back against a utilitarianism common in approaches to education.
Insofar as students see value in education, they often understand that value to be instrumental. Why go to school? So that you can learn the skills you need to get a good job, make good money, and make a name for yourself.
While education is of course useful, that mindset can rob students of the joy of doing something neither because it will get one ahead, nor as an escape from the rat race, but because it’s intrinsically worthwhile.
Reading and reciting poetry cultivates this joy. Though far from useless—great poems enrich vocabulary, and performance sharpens public speaking skills—poetry nevertheless presents itself primarily as something lovely, and only incidentally as something useful. In this, it imitates leisure, which restores us for work only when we seek it for its own sake.
In a 1780 letter to his 12-year-old son, John Adams counseled John Quincy Adams to prioritize his study of Latin oratory and Greek poetry above more “useful sciences,” which he could attain thereafter. The elder Adams no doubt knew from experience the importance of learning how to be at leisure early, before high office demands the bulk of one’s time.
Georgia and Arkansas seem to have taken a page out of the second president’s book in carving out for students space for the contemplation, festivity, and beauty of poetry among the more useful sciences.
Let’s hope other states follow suit.
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Australia: Victorian schools add another activist event to the calendar
Victorian schools celebrating the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT) set for May 18 prove, yet again, how successful the cultural-Left has been in taking a long march through the institutions.
These schools join a host of others drinking the Kool-Aid including libraries, local councils, universities, government departments, and banks like the NAB who are all willing to push neo-Marxist-inspired radical gender theory.
Schools are no longer places where students are taught to master the basics and where teachers introduce them to what the Victorian Blackburn Report describes as our ‘best validated knowledge and artistic achievements’.
Instead, when it comes to gender and sexuality, children as young as 5 are told that ‘love is love’, ‘everyone is special, just the way they are’, and that students should dress ‘up in rainbow colours in respect to the LGBTQ+ community’.
Even more concerning is one school’s invitation to a drag queen ‘to spend time in the library reading stories to children’. Drag queens perform regularly at LGBTQ+ functions, and this person advertises that they are willing to ‘bring colour and campness to any event’.
Celebrating IDAHOBIT day each year is just another example of the way students are taught gender and sexuality, instead of being biologically determined and God given, are social constructs where each child has the right to decide where they sit on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
Since the inception of the Safe Schools in 2013, described by one of its designers as heralding a neo-Marxist revolution in gender and sexuality, students have been told Western societies like Australia are hetero-normative and guilty of promoting cis-genderism.
In school libraries children’s books like She’s My Dad and The Gender Fairy are increasingly common, gaining prominence based on the belief traditional stories like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are no longer acceptable as they promote a romanticised, binary view of sexuality.
In primary schools, children are warned against using gender specific pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘she’ and kindergarten teachers are told children ‘have multiple and changing identities’ and must be taught about ‘identity formation that encompass gender identity and gender expression (with a non-binary dichotomy) and family diversity’.
In this brave new world, victimhood and identity politics prevail, and the fact the overwhelming majority of babies are born with either XX or XY chromosomes, is denied… Also denied is the majority of Australians who are happy to be men or women and that there is nothing inherently bad about heterosexuality.
While unfair discrimination is wrong as everyone, regardless of gender and sexuality, deserves respect and equal treatment, the reality is indoctrinating primary and secondary students with radical gender theory is an egregious example of schools failing in their duty of care.
Parents are their children’s primary educators and moral guardians and schools are wrong to indoctrinate students with radical gender ideology. Subverting the role of parents is especially unacceptable for those parents of religious faith who believe gender and sexuality are God given.
As written in the Bible, God created Adam and Eve and the sanctity of marriage is based on the belief men and women join for the purpose of procreation. In response to the argument gender and sexuality are two different things it is also the case the Catholic Church believes they are inseparable.
Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia argues ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated’ and to ‘attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality’ is to be guilty of ‘trying to replace the Creator’.
One of the reasons Republican governors including Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Virginia’s Glen Youngkin are so electorally popular is because both support parents in their fight against radical gender theory. A lesson yet to be learned by the Opposition Leader John Pesutto and his leadership team in their cancelling of Moira Deeming.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/idahobit-victorian-schools-add-another-activist-event-to-the-calendar/ ?
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15 May, 2023
Over 25 school employees arrested for sexual misconduct with minors in just one week
More than 25 school employees were arrested for sexual misconduct with students over the past week alone — including a teacher who bombarded a boy with 600 text messages and another who performed oral sex in a classroom.
In what has become a surging nationwide epidemic, teachers, counselors, and other staffers — both men and an increasing number of women — are targeting students for sexual gratification.
Indiana high school teacher Paige Simon, 28, was arrested last week for allegedly touching a male student’s groin in front of classmates and sending him 600 text messages — including some that contained explicit language and discussion of sex toys.
When the 15-year-old stopped corresponding with her, authorities said Simon showed up to one of his baseball games to continue her pursuit. The victim’s parents discovered the trove of messages between the two and contacted authorities.
California teacher Rebekah Blackwell-Taylor was arrested at Orange Vista High School in Riverside County this week for allegedly performing a sex act on a student inside a classroom.
She was booked into jail on charges of “annoying and molesting a child under the age of 18 and additional felony charges,” authorities said.
In New Jersey, 27-year-old teacher’s aide and marching band director Michelle Jacoby was taken into custody for allegedly sleeping with a student for several years beginning when he was a freshman.
The boy’s age and further details were not made available.
The victim reportedly told another teacher at Riverside High School in Burlington County about the relationship and they contacted police.
Michele Little, 29, a teacher at Sarasota Military High School in Florida, was nabbed last week after hanging a sign on her door that a test was in session so she could be alone with a student.
The pair allegedly kissed in the classroom for 15 minutes, officials said. Rumors about the incident soon began to fly and Little was eventually taken into custody following a police investigation.
She was charged with felony indecent, lewd or lascivious touching of certain minors and released on bond over the weekend.
Also in Florida, cops busted a Tampa middle school teacher’s assistant Thursday for possession and distribution of child pornography.
After receiving a tip, police searched the home of Ricky Broadnax, 55, a staffer at Liberty Middle School.
Investigators discovered a safe with images of child pornography on data storage devices and placed him under arrest.
Officials said they haven’t found evidence that any of his students were victims but noted their probe is ongoing.
Jacob De La Paz, a former Louisiana math teacher and coach at St. Thomas Moore in Lafayette, was picked up by federal agents last week for sending an explicit SnapChat video to a minor student.
De La Paz was probed after the clip was leaked online and is now facing felony charges.
Other school staffers arrested for sexual misconduct include a 23-year-old male Atlanta middle school teacher accused of abusing a 14-year-old girl on campus and a male Missouri substitute teacher who sent pornography to several minor students.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/over-25-school-employees-arrested-for-sex-misconduct-in-one-week
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Maine Elementary School Encouraged Students to Participate in BLM March
An elementary school in Portland, Maine reportedly encouraged fifth grade students to participate in a Black Lives Matter protest, according to documents obtained by parental rights organization Parents Defending Education.
Presumpscot Elementary School of Portland Public Schools posted a video of the students protesting and shouting “Black Lives Matter” in March. Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to the district requesting documents and emails relating to the event (via Parents Defending Education):
In all of the emails, most of the school staff involved in discussions of the march have their pronouns listed in their email signatures. In one file of emails, the principal of Presumpscot Elementary School stated on March 4, 2023:
There are moments as an educator/leader when you are humbled by the students and staff you work with. Friday was one of those moments. I was waiting at the green light on the corner of Washington and Presumpscot behind a car. We were waiting to turn left when most of our school held up traffic as they marched chanting Black Lives Matter. It was incredible. Thank you, [redacted] and PRS Civil rights Team, for leading this work. Our students are the next leaders of this country and world and I know because of them it will be a more just place.
In this same file of emails, a fifth grade teacher with pronouns in her email signature who helped organize the march explained more about the event. In an email dated February 16, 2023, she stated:
On February 28th from 9:30-10, 5th grade students will be leading a march to celebrate the end of Black History Month. This march is organized and led by the 5th grade civil rights team and is united in the message that Black Lives Matter here at Presumpscot and in our global community! Classes are invited to join the march by walking with us and visiting our memorial/celebration in the new cafeteria throughout the day.
PDE noted that a fifth grade student emailed a teacher to provide plans for the march. Part of the plans included going into classrooms and making an announcement “telling everyone where the march is and and [sic] tell them about it and why it is so important and to please respect the piece of work that all the civil rights team did and please come with your class or with friends.”
The day before the march, a teacher sent out an email stating that class schedules were arranged around allowing students to go to the march. And, teachers assigned lessons that centered around BLM, including showing students a “Pyramid of Hate.” The pyramid claims that actions like using “non-inclusive language” and committing “microaggressions” will lead to “the act or intent to deliberately and systematically annihilate an entire people.”
“Using Black Lives Matter talking points and a ‘Pyramid of Hate’ for elementary students is not teaching leadership skills, it is promoting ideological indoctrination that doesn’t belong in the K-12 classrooms. A school district that has a proficiency score below 50% should be focused on effective methods to address the learning loss their students are facing, not encouraging partisan activities," Mailyn Salabarria, the director of community engagement for Parents Defending Education, told Townhall.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/05/11/students-blm-protest-n2623113
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The Woke University’s Servant Class
Though there were many aspects of teaching college students that I loved, I quit when I realized that for all the work I was doing at a top tier university, I was making less than $10 an hour. My situation was not unique. I was one of the tens of thousands of adjunct faculty members whose underpaid labor fuels the modern university system, which has sacrificed the principle of educating students for the sake of maximizing profits and protecting administrative jobs. Debates about American colleges typically center on culture war battles over woke versus anti-woke curriculums. But if you want to understand how the university system got to be so broken you have to look at the underlying infrastructure of higher education. The best place to start is with the adjunct system.
When we think of exploited workers, our thoughts normally turn to fast-food employees, agricultural migrants, or day-laborers in the construction or landscaping industries. But one of the largest groups of exploited workers—a group we’ll define for these purposes as those who earn less than 30% of the salary of the prevailing wage for similar work—are college instructors. So-called “adjunct faculty” now account for more than 70% of all college and university faculty members but, despite their title, they are not treated as faculty in any protected, technical, or professional sense. They are adjunct because they are easily replaceable cogs in the academic machine. There’s even an obscure new name for these exploited knowledge workers, in keeping with the fashion of attaching obscure labels to familiar things: “contingent faculty.” At least the label is accurate. For adjuncts, who have sold their career, future hopes of promotions, and many of their rights as employees for wages that qualify some instructors for public assistance, their entire existence is “contingent” on the whims of university leaders and administrators. And while the system itself is inherently unfair, the adjuncts are not its only victims. The entire university experience, more expensive than ever for students, has been compromised and hollowed out by this short-sighted arrangement.
The rise of the “contingent class” is a relatively new phenomenon. Adjunct professors in the 1970s used to be a small subset of the teaching population. Most professors were either full-time or on a tenure track. Between 1980 and 2020, the same period when the hiring of adjuncts exploded, the average price of tuition, fees, and room and board for an undergraduate degree increased 169%, according to a recent report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
This economic model has created two distinctive classes of instructors in higher education. In the windowed offices are those tenured or tenure-track professors who are achieving six-figure salary status. These only represent something like a quarter of the total faculty at present. Wandering the halls, meanwhile, are the vast majority of adjunct faculty members, some three-quarters of all instructors, who are paid piecemeal, and lack job security and full employee protections.
For the past six years, I worked as a member of this “contingent faculty” (teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses). Teaching at this level typically requires a master’s degree or a Ph.D. to teach, and my credentials come from America’s best universities: Harvard, the Wharton School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. In addition, I had experience as a corporate CEO and CIO.
Most adjuncts are naturally afraid to speak out against unfair pay for fear of retribution. They have no rights, and quickly learn to swallow any objections. At one prestigious university where I taught an evening graduate course, while there were thousands of unused parking spaces I could not even get a parking pass.
During the pandemic, this same university chose not to send its foreign students to their native homes during the two-year period of the COVID pandemic. The reason: The F2F tuition the school was charging the students (and this school was in the top 100 in Forbes magazine for their graduate school) was three times the in-state or U.S. citizen tuition. Sending foreign students home would eliminate a very lucrative revenue source.
Additionally, such foreign nationals were required, according to the school’s pandemic-era policies, to attend at least three classes in-person each semester to maintain matriculation status and keep their student visas. That meant that there needed to be instructors on campus to teach these classes, but of course the full-time faculty could not be forced to endanger themselves by breaking COVID lockdown rules. So it was left to adjuncts like myself, who did not receive any medical insurance from the school, to drive to campus to hold in-person classes for these high-revenue students.
Despite teaching as many as eight courses in one term, I was never offered any of the benefits that are customarily associated with a full-time academic salary in America. Some schools have elected to restrict the hours adjunct faculty are allowed to work in order to avoid the Affordable Care Act requirement that would otherwise require them to provide health insurance to their employees. According to AdjunctNation, more than 200 schools set limits on adjunct working hours. Adjuncts typically earn between $20,000 and $25,000 annually, while the average salary for full-time instructors is $84,300, according to the American Association of University Professors.
Some adjuncts cobble together a full-time teaching schedule by offering classes at more than one university—as many as three or four. However, professors who “moonlight” at multiple colleges rarely earn the same salary or benefits as full-time instructors.
Debates about American colleges typically center on culture war battles over woke versus anti-woke curriculums. But if you want to understand how the university system got to be so broken you have to look at the underlying infrastructure of higher education.
Adjunct or not, the work expectations for college professors haven’t changed: Teach classes, maintain office hours, engage with students, write recommendations for jobs or graduate schools, grade papers, and participate in campus events. There is no payment to the teacher for course development, upgrading, or any of the other built-in work that goes into teaching. The course requirements on the school’s website mandate office hours (even digital ones), meeting options, and the number of hours that faculty have to respond to a student email. This is not only the same work for less money, it often has to be performed under tighter deadlines: A paper from the Center for the Future of Higher Education notes that contingent faculty have less time than full-time professors to prepare for courses.
The result of universities paying on the cheap is, predictably enough, an overall cheapening of the educational experience. According to Adrianna Kezar, head of the University of Southern California’s Delphi Project, “institutions that have large numbers of adjuncts or students that take lots of classes with adjuncts have lower graduation rates.”
Last year, I taught at two schools, a prestigious university and an average state college, for a total of 10 courses. Most academics would consider that a fairly full load for two semesters and a shorter summer term. My pay? $32,447.00 for the entire year. The more I considered all of the ancillary activities required of me, my pay rate on an hourly basis sunk under $10 per hour. After the W-2 forms came, I could calculate more accurately—and the answers were far more painful. I was making $1.77 per hour of work. Not since my days as a newspaper carrier did I earn so little. This same university, mind you, has a fully staffed and well-paid Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), with those salaries starting at $87,000 per year. Senior management salaries, meanwhile, are well over $150,000 per year. While many of these administrators and faculty members advocate for social and economic justice causes, it appears this doesn’t include advocating for paying their adjunct teachers a living wage.
In one sense, the treatment of adjuncts serves the same purpose in universities as does the exploitation of labor in all businesses—it allows the owners and shareholders to maximize profits. But in the modern university system, there is another crucial factor that has undercut wages for “contingent” faculty: The rapacious growth of the administrative class at virtually every institution of higher learning. From 1987 until 2011/12—the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day, according to an analysis of federal figures done by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan, social-science research group, the American Institutes for Research.
Colleges and universities have added these administrators and professional employees even as they’ve substantially shifted classroom teaching duties from full-time faculty to less-expensive part-time adjunct faculty and teaching assistants, the figures show. As Benjamin Ginsberg documented in The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, between 1985 and 2005 administrative spending increased by 85%, while administrative support staff increased by a dramatic 240%.
Decades ago, the position of adjunct filled a temporary need in an uncertain scheduling system, an extra “hand” to pitch in and teach a freshman composition or biology class, and that seemed an ideal way of addressing staffing uncertainties. The system today has “matured” however, as the accountants have discovered that more administrators can be hired and more funds are available for nonacademic purposes. The system of tenured academic professionals engaged in a lifelong career of teaching and research is slowly being strangled by the actuarial table.
The sad truth is that this system, for all its inequities, profits by a seemingly unending supply of professionally educated knowledge workers somehow willing to put up with a substandard wage by either teaching part-time as a side hustle, or lowering their living standards. Until enough baby boomers die off, or competition for competent paid faculty rises, we may be facing this situation for quite some tim
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/woke-university-servant-class
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14 May, 2023
FBI Investigation Needed of Loudoun County School Board and Prosecutor, Not Parents
On May 10, WJLA TV broke news that in Loudoun County staff and associates of school board members and of Democrat officials and candidates (among them the county’s Soros-backed anti-incarceration prosecutor Buta Biberaj and the Democrat candidate for Sheriff Craig Buckley) were part of a group calling itself “Loudoun Love Warriors.”
Group members plotted acts of violence, intimidation, and character assassination against Loudoun County parents in retaliation for their exercise of First Amendments to protest school board policies supporting critical race theory, withholding information from the public concerning a rape and sexual assault by a trans boy in girls’ restrooms, supporting obscene and indecent content in school libraries and classes, and supporting the transitioning of youth.
Among the parents targeted by the group were Mark Winn, Elicia Brand, and Scott Mineo. Execution of threatened attacks against Mineo led his employer to terminate his employment. The parents received threats of violence by phone. A member of the group appalled by the plotting of violence and character assassination gave copies of the online discussions to WJLA TV. A complaint has been filed with Loudoun County Sheriff Michael L. Chapman whose office is investigating.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is familiar with Loudoun County. Indeed, in 2021 he authorized the FBI to target parents for investigation and prosecution in Loudoun County in response to education association and Biden Administration false accusations that parents were threatening school board members and demands that the AG act.
Without any evidence of violent threats by parents against school board members, Garland nevertheless authorized the FBI to investigate and work with local authorities to arrest and prosecute. Now the actual evidence of violent threats is before us, and it comes not from the parents against the board but from staff and associates of the board, Democrat candidates, and the Commonwealth’s Attorney, Buta Biberaj.
Those staff and associates through an online group they formed called “Loudoun Love Warriors” have actually made threats and taken steps to effectuate them. If Garland fails to call for an FBI investigation given the direct proof from the Loudoun Love Warriors’ whistleblower, he will reconfirm public perception of his biased, two-tiered system of justice. If he does call for an investigation, he will ignite howls from the far left of his party. What will he do? Will he yet again allow political bias to determine his enforcement of the law?
The Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares should also investigate. The Soros-baked Commonwealth’s Attorney, Biberaj, who would ordinarily be charged with prosecuting a case of law violation by Loudoun County residents is in this instance conflicted, and a necessary witness. It is her own campaign staffer who is implicated in the conspiracy to violate the rights of parents. She must therefore recuse herself or, if not, the presiding Loudoun Circuit judge in the matter should compel her removal in favor of another Commonwealth’s Attorney.
What the members of the Loudoun Love Warriors have done is no small crime. It is a serious felony on the federal and state levels. Fines and incarceration for up to ten years are the assigned penalties. 18 U.S.C. Section 241 (conspiracy against rights) reads in pertinent part: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title and imprisoned not more than ten years, or both . . .”
Virginia Code Section 24.2-1015 also provides in pertinent part: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, intimidate, prevent, or hinder any citizen of this Commonwealth in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the provisions of this title, or because of his having so exercised such right, they shall be guilty of a Class 5 felony.” Under the Virginia Code, the term of imprisonment for a Class 5 felony is not less than one year nor more than 10 years and carries a fine of not more than $2,500.
On the federal level, if Merrick Garland will do his job (perhaps a pipe dream), an FBI investigation will occur and will provide evidence for the bringing of facts before a grand jury for indictment of those whom the evidence suggests violated federal law. As the investigations proceed, there may be additional evidence of federal and state law violations. In addition, each of those parents victimized by the acts of violence and intimidation has causes of action for civil wrongs, torts, committed against them.
Moreover, the fact that staff and associates of Loudoun County School Board members, Democrat candidates for office in Loudoun County, and Commonwealth’s Attorney Biberaj participated in a conspiracy to violate the rights of parents reveals potential widespread government corruption, possibly involving Loudoun County School Board members and the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has jurisdiction over each institution that makes use of state funds and has an obligation to investigate to determine if there are instances of law violation, public corruption and abuse of power. He should therefore commence an investigation and pursue whatever charges are warranted to ensure that if law violations have taken place those responsible are recommended for removal from office and are prosecuted
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‘We’re Preparing to Restart Repayment’: Education Secretary on Federal Student Loans
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona revealed during a recent hearing that the Biden administration is preparing to restart the payment of federal student loan debt that was paused amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
During a May 11 hearing of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.) cited remarks by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre who said, regarding the debt ceiling, that “if you buy a car, you are expected to pay the monthly payments. If you buy a home, you are expected to pay the mortgage every month. That is the expectation.”
Britt said she believes “that same logic must apply to student loans,” to which Cardona responded, “We agree and we’re preparing to restart repayment because the emergency period is over, and we’re preparing our borrowers to restart.”
At the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, student loan payments were suspended by the government. Since then, two presidential administrations have pushed back the end of the suspension period eight times.
In August after rolling out the debt forgiveness plan, the White House announced that repayments would begin Jan. 1, 2023. But this was pushed back after legal challenges to the forgiveness plan reached the Supreme Court.
At present, the Supreme Court is reviewing the orders of a lower court that blocked the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness plan. Payments are scheduled to resume either 60 days after June 30 or 60 days after the court ruling if the ruling comes before June 30. The court is expected to issue a ruling on the matter this summer.
Back in November, the Department of Education revealed that it had received applications from 26 million individuals for the loan forgiveness program—out of which 16 million were approved. The lower court order prevented the department from considering more applicants as well as forgiving student debt.
Cardona added that the HEROES Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in January 2002, allows him to “create a waiver for those who are impacted significantly by the pandemic.”
“We recognize after three years of paused payments through two administrations, that the repayment restart is going to be a very important step, and we want to make sure it’s done right,” Cardona said.
“We’re confident that the targeted debt relief will address some of the concerns of some of our borrowers who are struggling right now. But as they re-enter repayment, it’s really important that we provide support for them.”
Issues With Student Loan Forgiveness Plan
According to Biden’s forgiveness scheme, individuals with an annual income of less than $125,000 who have received a Pell Grant while studying could get up to $20,000 of their student loan debt canceled.
Speaking at a March 23 House Committee on Education & the Workforce hearing, Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) warned that Biden’s plan will “mortgage our children’s future.”
“The Biden administration’s proposal is a patchwork attempt that takes a structural problem that will only make worse issues of rising prices and low-quality education,” he said. “This has left millions of Americans with student debt that far exceeds the financial value of their degree.”
In a March 6 commentary in The Epoch Times, Daniel Lacalle, chief economist at hedge fund Tressis, criticized the idea of student loan forgiveness, pointing out that it does nothing to solve the cost of tuition.
Instead, the program may even raise tuition as universities see that the government will subsidize those who take on difficult-to-pay loans, he warned.
“Furthermore, by providing a subsidy to the already indebted, banks may have an incentive to give loans to students with less probability to repay them. It’s likely to create a wave of nonperforming loans predicated on the view that this scheme will be prolonged and even increased,” Lacalle said.
According to a budget model of the proposed student loan forgiveness plan made by the Penn Wharton University of Pennsylvania, the cost of the program could come to anywhere between $333 billion and $361 billion over a 10-year period.
On May 10, the Republican-controlled House Education and the Workforce Committee advanced a resolution aimed at invoking its authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to put an end to Biden’s loan forgiveness program.
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New Jersey educator passed over for 45 promotions because he’s white, he claims in lawsuit
A New Jersey educator was passed over for nearly four dozen promotions because he is white, he claims in an explosive new lawsuit.
Thomas F. Franco alleges the Paterson, NJ school district won’t promote him to an administrative position solely because of his skin color, according to the discrimination lawsuit filed last month.
The 58-year-old Ringwood resident contends he’s applied for “more than 45 positions” since he was hired in 2016, and has only been interviewed once.
“Nearly all administrative level positions within the PPS [Paterson Public Schools], greater than 95%, are held by Black and Hispanic individuals,” according to the suit filed in Passaic Superior Court.
“Many of the people” hired instead of him were “less experienced” and didn’t have his academic credentials, Franco argued in papers.
Franco has the necessary state certificates to fill the principal and vice principal posts he sought, his lawyer told The Post.
And he served as an interim administrator in 2016.
“While I applaud the fact that the district employs many minorities to serve its mostly minority student population, at the same time the district should not prevent highly qualified individuals who may be a non-minority, from being promoted,” said attorney Evan Goldman.
“Mr. Franco’s potential promotion will only serve to enhance all of the students experiences in the district.”
Franco has two master’s degrees from St. Peter’s University and Rutgers University, and a bachelor’s degree in biology and psychology from Rutgers, according to his LinkedIn page.
The district “does not provide the same opportunities for advancement to White applicants as it does to minority candidates,” according to the court papers.
Franco is currently working as a guidance counselor at Paterson’s International High School, according to the school’s website.
His salary is $82,555, according to district payroll records.
“Throughout the course of Mr. Franco’s employment with PPS, he has always received performance evaluations rating him either “highly effective” or “effective,” the suit says.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/13/nj-educator-passed-over-for-45-promotions-lawsuit/
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11 May, 2023
Jeffco Public Schools and JCEA’s Are Engaged in a Discriminatory Bargaining Agreement
“No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
Title VI of the Civil RIghts Act of 1964 very explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.
But that didn’t prevent Jeffco Public Schools and the Jefferson County Education Association from drafting a bargaining agreement last fall that contains undeniably discriminatory anti-white initiatives, offering special programs and professional advancement opportunities to people of color.
The agreement between the district and the association makes clear their intent to “…implement programs to attract, recruit and retain staff, educators and administrators that more closely reflect the racial, ethical and linguistic diversity of the student body of the district, including supporting non-licensed personnel in attaining educator licenses and providing programs for students of color to explore and pursue education as a future profession.”
The agreement further expressed the district and the association’s stated goal to “…create a safe space for educators of color to meet and support each other and find support around the challenges and opportunities of being an educator of color in Jefferson County.”
Nowhere are these programs offered to white faculty or students, even though more than 90 percent of Jefferson County residents are white.
Last September, Parents Defending Education (PDE) filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against Jeffco Public Schools for discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin, violating both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Colorado parents are already witnessing these discriminatory ideals in action, with leftist dogma like Critical Race Theory (CRT) replacing the three R’s. One parent told The Denver Post her son’s class was “… given a ‘privilege checklist’ so they could reckon with the unearned perks of their identity.”
The article noted, “The impression her son took away is that all white people are racist; all men are sexist; racism is everywhere; slurs against white people are acceptable, and it is OK to stereotype whites.”
Despite the Colorado Springs School District voting to ban the teaching of CRT, many educators – including at least 100 from Colorado – have already signed a pledge authored by the Zinn Education Project, a radical left-wing initiative named after self-proclaimed socialist college professor Howard Zinn, vowing to teach CRT anyway.
The nation’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA) tweeted in June of 2021 promoting CRT educational curricula. The tweet was supported by the Colorado Education Association (CEA), the largest teachers' union in the state, and appeared on the same day they retweeted the information about A Day of Action, the event sponsored by the Zinn Education Project, encouraging teachers to pledge to teach CRT regardless of government regulation.
Nearly half of the U.S. has banned or are considering passing legislation to ban the teaching of CRT, but the NEA, who collaborates with approximately 14,000 school districts has formally announced, “We oppose attempts to ban Critical Race Theory.”
Elisha Roberts, chief academic officer at a Denver Public Schools charter school, asserted, “If you want to be the visionary leader that this city needs, talk about what educational equity means. It means rich, white families in this city giving up something. It means reallocating resources to our black and brown schools. It means providing opportunities for educational equity for our black and brown educators, and that means potentially paying them more for being black and brown in our cities, and in our schools.”
Incredibly, the Denver Public Schools’ indoctrination goes even further. In January 2020, the district released a “Resolution on Inclusion for Our LGBTQIA+ Employees, Students and Community Members” updating the district’s human resources policy to include more genders than male and female, requires teachers to call the students by their chosen name regardless of whether the student had legally changed it and prescribes that every Denver Public School and building must offer a gender neutral restroom.
Further, it calls for eliminating practices that “reinforce inflexible structures surrounding gender” and implementing curricular changes that include trans and non-binary students.
The LGBTQIA+ resolution was initiated by the Denver Public School Board Education Director, Tay Anderson, who proudly played a pivotal role in introducing and passing the resolution. Anderson was endorsed by the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) in his race for school board, despite the union being aware of sexual misconduct allegations against the candidate.
DCTA also contributed $50,000 in monetary and in-kind donations to his campaign thereafter, campaign finance records show.
Anderson, who won election to the school board in 2019, has been under investigation by a private firm hired by Denver Public Schools following an anonymous accusation of sexual assault.
The school year after Anderson’s LGBTQIA+ initiative was propagated, Denver Public Schools witnessed a 35 percent increase of students reporting they use “nontraditional gender markers.”
The radical left-wing ideology that has infiltrated Colorado public schools goes beyond gender and race, with the largest teachers’ union in the state, the CEA voting in April to approve an expressly anti-capitalism resolution allowing the CEA to lobby anti-capitalistic initiatives through the Colorado legislature.
In an effort to combat this radical indoctrination, Colorado lawmakers introduced curriculum transparency legislation during the 2021 session that would require public schools to post all teaching materials online. The bill drew major opposition from the CEA, the Colorado Association of School Boards and the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, according to lobbying records from the secretary of state’s office.
The CEA leader called the transparency legislation a “massive distraction,” claiming, “There’s simply not a problem to be solved here.”
In fact, her denial of the problem is the problem.
The state of Colorado’s public school system is transforming into a Marxist indoctrination camp, and Coloradans must filter out the lies and distortions to confront these radical initiatives or risk collapsing into a full-fledged authoritarian regime.
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DeSantis Signs 4 of Largest Reforms of Public Education in Florida History
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' office dubs the package of four bills the “Teachers Bill of Rights,” saying it contains some of the largest reforms to public education since the school choice wave that began in the Sunshine State in 1996. (Photo illustration: Chris Ryan/Caiaimage,/Getty Images)
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed four landmark pieces of education legislation Tuesday that seek to “empower teachers,” protect schools from the harmful effects of social media, expand student scholarships, and authorize one standardized test as an alternative to two others.
DeSantis’ office has dubbed the package of four bills the “Teachers Bill of Rights,” saying it contains some of the largest reforms to public education since the school choice wave that began in Florida in 1996.
In one significant change, Florida will become the first state to allow use of the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, as an alternative to the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the American College Testing exam to determine whether students qualify to graduate.
SB 256, one of the bills signed by the governor, focuses on “paycheck protection.” This includes prohibiting teachers unions from deducting union dues directly from teachers’ paychecks. Florida joins other states, such as Indiana, that already have taken such a step to prevent teachers unions from sneaking thousands of dollars a year out of teachers’ pockets with such incremental paycheck deductions.
SB 256 also requires annual audits and financial disclosures for all teachers unions, both local and national affiliates, operating in Florida. The Florida Attorney General’s Office will be required to investigate suspected union fraud.
Teachers unions in Florida will be banned from parlaying with school boards in backroom deals at taxpayers’ and teachers’ expense.
In perhaps the biggest change of SB 256, teachers unions now must garner a membership of at least 60% of a school district’s faculty to remain recognized by the district or to engage in collective bargaining on behalf of members.
Another bill signed by DeSantis, HB 1537, rolls back regulations that have been accused of stunting growth in Florida’s education sector for decades. Temporary teaching certificates will be good for five years rather than three, and all levels of certification will have fewer “unnecessary bureaucratic requirements.”
Specifically, teachers have new pathways to maintain and renew their certifications. This will begin Florida’s disentanglement from deeply out-of-date professional development requirements that have eaten up thousands of hours of teachers’ time with little to show in gained skill or methodology.
Concerning teacher training, HB 1537 also allows “aspiring teachers” to apply for temporary certification if they hold professional skill in other but related fields—even if those aspiring teachers aren’t members of teacher education programs on the university level.
In a monumental shift, Florida is now the first state to authorize the Classic Learning Test for students to qualify for graduation and to earn one of the state’s Bright Futures scholarships. The CLT is an alternative assessment for high school students that focuses on evaluating “English, grammar, and mathematical skills, providing a comprehensive measure of achievement and aptitude.”
Many universities have begun adding the CLT to their standardized testing choices.
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, whose background is in education, points out: “More than 200 private colleges and universities accept the CLT, and Florida’s fastest growing Catholic university, Ave Maria University, recently made it the school’s ‘preferred’ college entrance exam for applicants.”
The College Board, which creates and administers the SAT and high school Advanced Placement courses, has received heavy criticism in recent years both for changing content on exams and including racially divisive, historically inaccurate, and unscientific material.
This, as well as the booming growth in classical education via charter, private, and homeschooling, has driven the CLT to national prominence in the past five years.
Including the CLT as an option for high school students to graduate could be a step toward giving students of diverse learning backgrounds a choice to focus on more “tried and true” subjects of study.
CLT founder Jeremy Wayne Tate told The Daily Signal:
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of standardized testing. In addition to providing insight into where a student is at academically, the content of this test has a profound influence in shaping curriculum. I could not be more excited that Florida has made this move. We expect at least three more states [to do so] next year.
DeSantis also signed HB 477, which reduces term limits for Florida’s public school boards from 12 to eight years. This change, according to the governor’s office, brings school boards into line with the term limits set for Florida’s governor, the governor’s Cabinet members, and the Florida Legislature.
In another landmark action, the Legislature approved House Joint Resolution 31, which will put forward a referendum to return the state’s public school boards to a partisan election system in which candidates may identify themselves as Republicans, Democrats, or members of another party. The change would make Florida the fifth state to allow openly partisan elections for school boards.
The fourth bill signed by DeSantis, HB 379, focuses on taking social media out of Florida’s public education system altogether. It requires public school districts to “prevent students from connecting to social media sites on district-owned computers and servers,” as well as prohibits TikTok, a Chinese-owned social media program, to be accessed on district devices.
HB 379 gives teachers increased authority to establish their own rules, free of administration intervention, for students’ cellphone use in their classroom.
So far, responses from both legacy media and teachers unions have been interesting, to say the least.
An Associated Press headline accuses DeSantis of “taking aim” with the new laws at a teachers union that previously had “defied” him, although no specific teachers union is mentioned in any of the bills signed by the governor.
NBC affiliate WFLA-8 of Tampa, Florida, vaguely accuses DeSantis of “easing graduation requirements,” though reporter Trevor Sochocki doesn’t specify how the bills he signed would ease any graduation requirements whatsoever.
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, released a written statement in which he claimed: “This new law grossly oversteps in trying to silence teachers, staff, professors and most other public employees. We will not go quietly—our students and our professions are simply too important.”
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South Dakota History Standards Scrap Critical Race Theory, Build on Hillsdale Foundation
While much of the cultural debate about education centers on school libraries removing sexually explicit books, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem’s team has been hard at work crafting new K-12 history and social studies standards that her chief of staff calls a “model for the rest of the country.”
Noem rejected an earlier effort in 2021, which her team faults for a leftist slant and for including critical race theory. The governor gathered a new commission to compile standards in 2022, including a former politics professor who had taught at Hillsdale College, a Christian school with decades of outreach in the K-12 classical school movement that is known for its rigorous approach to Western and American history. That former professor, Will Morrisey, served as a facilitator for a diverse commission—25% of which was Native American—that tailored the standards for South Dakota.
“When it comes to social studies standards, the governor wanted us to create a model for the rest of the country, and I think the rest of the country will see a model that they can follow,” Mark Miller, Noem’s chief of staff and a member of the 2022 commission, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview last week. “We think this is an incredible positive change and step forward in terms of providing a true and honest American history for the children of South Dakota from K to 12.”
The state’s Board of Education Standards voted to approve the standards in April. Miller mentioned the standards’ three pillars: world history that provides the foundation for U.S. history, Native American history that formed South Dakota, and U.S. history.
Ben Jones, the state historian and a member of the 2022 commission, said the new standards represent a model for the rest of the country because they reject the approach of progressive education reformer John Dewey, who transformed American education to focus on skills, rather than content.
The new standards “put content and knowledge at the center of things,” Jones told The Daily Signal in an interview last week. “I think they’re a model because they excavate the John Dewey progressive notion about skills” and using education as a tool to “funnel students into jobs,” rather than equipping them with the knowledge to be informed citizens.
Some education groups have opposed the standards, suggesting they require students to learn too much.
“I believe that more facts do not necessarily mean better standards,” Summer Schultz, president of the South Dakota School Superintendents Association, told KELOLAND. “We need every minute of the day that we can to make sure our students are leaving those classes at grade level in reading and mathematics so that they have that strong foundation to be successful academic learners later.” She warned that if students are focused on memorizing facts, “they have a lack of balance.”
Jones, the state historian, insisted that teachers can incorporate a great deal of civics and history material into reading lessons. “In the elementary years, the content is going to reinforce their reading,” he noted, which “can be heavy on history, civics, economy, geography, and stories about them.”
He also noted that South Dakota is launching professional development programs for teachers to help them incorporate these civics lessons into the curriculum.
Hillsdale weighs in
Kathleen O’Toole, assistant provost for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, noted that social studies standards “cannot, by definition, require memorization.” Yet she defended memorization as “important for setting a basic timeline in the students’ minds before deeper inquiry takes place.”
“Hillsdale’s own recommended curricula are built on this principle, and in its affiliated schools, teachers lead students through a deep inquiry of history through thoughtful questions and the discussion that naturally follows,” O’Toole added. “In any course of study, materials should be presented in a context that is age-appropriate and takes into account the developmental stages of students.”
O’Toole noted that many state officials, school administrators, and concerned parents often reach out to Hillsdale’s K-12 office for recommendations. In this case, South Dakota tapped Morrisey “independently of Hillsdale.” Hillsdale College did not review or approve the South Dakota standards.
“While Dr. Morrisey’s work was not connected to Hillsdale, we are proud that he used Hillsdale’s generic civics standards as the basis for the new South Dakota standards,” she noted. “The commission customized Hillsdale’s generic materials to reflect South Dakota’s Native Indian tribes and other historical details unique to that state. Hillsdale College believes that high-quality social studies standards should be robust, nonpartisan, and thorough. It is heartening whenever Hillsdale’s work is an aid to establishing such standards.”
Critical race theory
The true root of the controversy may involve debates over critical race theory, an approach to history, civics, and other disciplines that encourages students to find “systemic racism” throughout American institutions and to reexamine every aspect of life through a race-based lens that assumes white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed.
Miller, the governor’s chief of staff, said Noem moved to craft new standards because the 2021 proposed standards had a “leftward tilt” and politicized standards are “simply unacceptable to the governor.”
“We didn’t want to see a leftward tilt in the teaching of history, which we think has infected too much of the teaching of the public school system in general since Dewey,” he explained. “In our history classes and civics classes, we have to be careful not to teach our children that our country has been a bad actor since 1776 or even before that, but rather has been a shining light for the rest of the world.”
Jones, the state historian, said critical race theory is “a great conversation for college students and grad students to have, but it’s not proper historical inquiry.” Proper history involves investigating the facts to draw conclusions, but “critical race theory provides that answer right up front.”
K-12 teachers do students a “disservice” if they teach through a critical race theory lens because it leaves students “underinformed about and unable to test your preconceived notions.”
Jones noted that many commentators suggest that “critical race theory is just teaching about race, which is absolutely wrong.”
“There’s plenty of teaching about race in the standards we have, but there’s no preconceived notion about what the outcome is going to be,” he noted.
Jones praised Morrisey’s contributions for including “plenty of material about race, slavery, the Japanese exclusion laws, Chinese exclusion laws, the KKK.”
Jones and Miller insisted that the standards include the dark parts of U.S. history, but the state historian declared that “the idea that because someone is a certain race, they have certain talents” does not belong in K-12 education.
Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation who has analyzed the standards, praised them for excluding “woke orthodoxy.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“These standards appropriately reject the woke orthodoxy surrounding radical gender theory and racial preferences found in states such as Minnesota and California,” he told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “The standards are rigorous and involve a nontrivial amount of facts and specific content regarding notable individuals and events in American and world history.”
World and Native American history
Yet the standards do not just include U.S. history—warts and all—but also the longer history of human civilization.
“The United States didn’t just spring anew,” Miller said. “It came from an intellectual history going back centuries, and that’s the idea for these standards.”
The new South Dakota standards require lessons on ancient Egypt, China, India, Babylon, Greece, Persia, and Rome, along with medieval and modern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history, at appropriate age levels.
Finally, the standards include a great deal of Native American history.
“The governor wanted a significant role for Native Americans to play,” Miller said, noting that a quarter of the commission was Native American. He mentioned Joe Circle Bear with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, state Rep. Tamara St. John with the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe, and Stephanie Hiatt with the Florida Seminole tribe.
“These standards have more teaching of Native American history than any standards South Dakota has had before,” Miller added.
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10 May, 2023
Due Process or Transgender Protection on Campus?
College campuses have long been battlegrounds between due process for those accused of sexual misconduct (innocent until proven guilty) and legal privileges for alleged victims who many automatically believe (guilty until proven innocent).
The front line is Title IX, the 1972 federal law designed to curb sex discrimination in schools. President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) wants to add gender identity to the mix. The players in this renewed conflict are Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who has introduced a bill to champion due process rights on campus, and Biden’s DOE, who is expanding the definition of discrimination.
The specific issue addressed by the DOE is athletic eligibility. The issue is a political flash point that revolves around the question, “Should transgendered male-to-females compete in women’s sports or is their strength advantage unfair to biological females?” This article examines the competing and overlapping provisions of the draft Title IX regulation, the 2023 draft sports regulation, and Kennedy’s bill.
The Biden executive order 14021 (March 8, 2021) that sparked the current conflict is entitled “Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free from Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.” It is a statement of intent. On April 6, 2023, the DOE rolled out an implementation mechanism for the executive order “Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students’ Eligibility for Athletic Teams.”
The language in the 116-page document is confusing and vague, but the core of it redefines terms such as “discrimination” and favorably includes gender identity into the framework for athletic eligibility. The opening summary states that the DOE will “set out a standard that would govern a recipient’s adoption or application of sex-related criteria” that might “limit or deny a student’s eligibility to participate on a male or female athletic team consistent with their gender identity.” This regulation presumes transgendered athletes are able participate in their chosen categories unless the school identifies safety reasons to not allow this.
Backlash from progressives has been swift. The “Proposed Change” is insufficiently protrans, they claim. “These regulations specify methods schools may employ to determine a student’s sex, including invasive physical examinations,” complains the transgender journalist Erin Reed.
Moreover, the DOE document would give school districts the final say on whether injecting gender identity into athletics is problematic. Progressives react with horror. Actually, this is no issue at all. As with past DOE recommendations, schools are likely to over comply not only due to the extreme liberal bias on most campuses but also to avoid a catastrophic loss of federal funds. The “Proposed Change” makes this threat explicitly.
And, on the other side, there is a renewed push for due process rights. On March 28, Kennedy introduced the Ensuring Fairness for Students Act that would codify due process protections for an accused into campus Title IX proceedings. It may be the finest due process legislation in decades. And it is timely. Donald Trump’s secretary of education Elizabeth DeVos (2017 to 2021) worked with some success to install traditional legal protections into campus hearings.
Now Kennedy accuses the Biden administration of trying to “roll back fair proceedings on school campuses by making students guilty until proven innocent.” The bill would provide other traditional due process protections, such as written notice of the allegations, objective evaluation of evidence, and cross-examination.
Kennedy’s bill is timely for at least two reasons. First, a few days after the bill was introduced, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education released its report “Spotlight on Campus Due Process 2022,” which is based on a national survey. Among the findings: 72 percent of universities did not provide timely notice of allegations to those accused of wrongdoing; 60 percent do not assure the presumption of innocence; only 15 percent of institutions guarantee that both accusers and the accused could see the evidence on hand. To the extent DeVos was successful, that progress is being eroded.
Second, the DOE’s “Proposed Change” focuses on transgender eligibility for sports, but this is almost guaranteed to expand into areas like harassment. The inevitability of the expansion is based on several factors, including the wording of Biden’s executive order “Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity.” Title IX is a broad antidiscrimination measure, not limited to sports. Moreover, the history of Title IX is one of constant redefinition and expansion. Even before the “Proposed Change” is enacted, progressives are pushing hard for more protections.
If gender harassment is included in Title IX, then it will be as subjective and legally vague as past sexual harassment standards which hinged on whether the complainant felt offended. The “Proposed Change” repeatedly prohibits causing “embarrassment” to those who gender identify but nowhere does it define or describe what causes or constitutes embarrassment.
Does it include a refusal to use a complicated and evolving set of self-declared pronouns from “xemself” and “zirself” to “ney” and “zie”? What if a student simply gets them wrong? If the mistake embarrasses a trans person, is it punishable? This provision violates what is called the vagueness doctrine. In constitutional law, a statute is void when it is so vague as to be either unenforceable or incomprehensible to the average person.
One thing is clear: if sexual misconduct expands to gender misconduct, many more people—almost always men—will be accused of abuse. This would further chill free speech on already cold campuses. It would also destroy innocent human beings. Accused violators will be punished, tried, and even expelled with scarlet Ts (transphobic) branded on their academic records. Without due process, Title IX proceedings are kangaroo courts.
People who oppose due process are opposing common decency in the legal treatment of others. With bitter irony, they do so in the name of protecting the vulnerable—in this case, the gender identified. Anyone who needs protection against common decency and truth is not pursuing justice. They want privilege and power. If the voice of reason can still be heard, people need to hear it now.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14496&omhide=true&trk=title
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Is it Wise to Fire-Proof Education Bureaucrats?
California Senate Bill 494, authored by Fullerton Democrat Josh Newman, stipulates that “The governing board of a school district shall not take action to terminate a superintendent or assistant superintendent of the school district, or both, without cause, at a special or emergency meeting of the governing board.” In similar style, the board shall not terminate a superintendent or assistant superintendent, “within 30 days after the first convening of the governing board after a general election.” Californians might wonder what this is about.
At a January 5 meeting, Orange Unified School District board members Rick Ledesma, John Ortega, Angie Rumsey, and Madison Miner fired superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen and suspended assistant superintendent Cathleen Corella, both out of the country at the time. The move came without explanation and left many in the district confused.
Some wondered whether the majority had violated the Ralph M. Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law. Taxpayers might question whether SB-494 is the proper remedy as the district works this out.
In California’s K-12 government school system, superintendents occupy a special place. They don’t teach, but they cost taxpayers a lot of money.
For example, Gunn Marie Hansen’s salary was $336,157–much higher than Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 224,020–with total pay and benefits of $426,978. Assistant superintendent Cathleen Corella is paid $203,086 in base salary, with a total pay and benefits package of $259,071. The beginning teacher’s salary in a small district is $46,844.
Before taxpayer dollars reach the classroom, they must trickle down through four layers of bureaucratic sediment: federal, state, county, and local. California’s county offices of education tend to be holding tanks for bureaucrats.
Prior to her employment in the Orange District, Cathleen Corella was a regional director for the Los Angeles County Office of Education. Superintendent Debra Duardo is paid a base salary of $361,280 with total pay and benefits of $440,604. If taxpayers thought such bureaucrats were grossly overpaid, it would be hard to blame them.
These exorbitant salaries are not conditional on student achievement. The taxpayer dollars keep coming, regardless of performance. In these conditions, taxpayers might question the wisdom of making superintendents fireproof.
A better strategy would be to empower parents to send their children to the school of their choice. Instead of funding a bloated bureaucratic system, let the dollars follow the scholars to the government or independent school of their choice, as in the G.I. Bill.
Meanwhile, SB-494 passed out of committee but needs full Senate approval before moving to the Assembly. How much difference it would make is debatable. Less than two months after her firing, the Westminster School District hired Dr. Gunn Marie Hansen at an annual salary of $335,000 plus benefits. In the government K-12 system, what goes around comes around.
https://blog.independent.org/2023/05/04/is-it-wise-to-fire-proof-education-bureaucrats/
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School shootings nationwide near 20 this year as communities struggle with safety measures
School shootings are on the rise. Last year was the highest number of shootings since EdWeek began tracking the issue in 2018. So far this year, there have been 19 shootings in K-12 schools resulting in 30 people killed or injured and communities are grappling with how to stop the violence.
At a school safety town hall in Virginia Monday night, parents told FOX mental health and communication should be among the top concerns for school districts.
"We do need to have information, concrete information, so I can make a solid risk decision about whether or not the school is safe enough for my daughter," said Dan Verton, parent of a student in Fairfax County Public Schools.
"I think that more emphasis on counseling and sort of the emotional support in the school, really make me feel better about sending my daughters here," said Paul Thomas, also an FCPS parent.
Some see arming educators as a way to fight back in the event of a shooting at school. FOX spoke with a group in Texas called the Cinco Peso Training Group, which has made it their mission to equip educators with the resources to protect themselves and their students against an armed intruder.
"The term we use for that is immediate responder," said Mike Lane, a co-founder of the group. Lane is a retired police captain and current police chief at a Texas public school.
Authorities investigate a home possibly connected to the school shooting in Nashville, Monday, March 27, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. Nashville police identified the victims in the private Christian school shooting Monday as three 9-year-old students and three adults in their 60s, including the head of the school. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Over 40 districts in Texas have educators who have completed the training, but Lane said that there are a lot of conversations before anyone picks up a firearm.
"We took the basic model that a police officer will get in the academy and expanded on that by a long, long shot along a lot more detail training on it," he said.
First, the superintendent and school board decide whether they want to allow armed faculty. Then they ask for community response. If the community supports the idea, the district goes to the faculty to see if anyone wants to volunteer. All "defenders" -- the term Lane and his team use to talk about those who complete the training -- are volunteers. No one is required to take this training.
For those interested, Lane said his group does extensive psychological evaluations and background checks before they admit someone in their training. All defenders also need to work in their district for about two years so colleagues can attest to how they handle pressure and stress. Lane said he narrows the pool of applicants based on these evaluations. The training goes beyond firearms and includes the national Stop the Bleed program, which teaches people how to respond to victims in life-threatening situations. After they complete the multi-day training, defenders are back on the range monthly to maintain their skills.
All of this training, said Lane, will save lives.
"If you equip people, and you empower them with training, and provide them with the tools to react in an emergency, it will without doubt make a difference in the number of casualties, injuries or any other problems, regardless of the type of event," he said.
Lane added that defenders are not a substitute for first responders, and they're not trained to take down an attacker. The purpose is to give educators the ability to defend themselves and their students.
"We just want to prepare and protect those children and staff members best as we can to fill in that gap between the time of the incident until the first responders have the ability to arrive," he said.
One superintendent, who self identified as a defender, said he thinks the program is even more crucial after recent shootings in rural areas like his.
"The tragedy in Uvalde really was a wakeup call to small rural communities all across our state that school safety and security has to be our top priority," said Brad Burnett, superintendent of Jacksboro Independent School District located about two hours outside Dallas.
Burnett said the defender program was already in place when he became superintendent, but as someone who went through the training, he supports giving his staff the option to be armed.
"We've seen a lot of support in our community and also just in our region to train educators to carry a firearm to protect students. So, I see it as a positive thing as a school leader," he said.
Critics say more guns in the classroom is not the answer to school safety.
"Let's just be very clear about the situation we're talking about here," said Kris Brown, president of the gun safety group Brady United. "An educator teaching a class with 20, 30, 40 students in the room, being expected to have access easily to a firearm, want to use it, and then successfully shoot the shooter without having any carnage of any other students."
Brown said she was also concerned students could get access to the firearm.
"There is a real risk that that gun will be found by a student when the teacher is going to the bathroom," she said. "Are they supposed to strap fully loaded all of the time as they're teaching? And how the kids feel about a teacher who's carrying a loaded weapon?"
Brown said her group supports the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed by Congress last year. The legislation allocated money for crisis intervention, barred those convicted of domestic violence from owning a firearm, and increased funding for school security.
Parents in Fairfax County said firearms in schools makes them uncomfortable even with adequate training.
"I've been a Homeland Security professional for decades, and former Marine, so arming teachers is the worst idea you could possibly come up with," said Verton. "You cannot put a teacher who's never handled a firearm, or in a stressful situation like that, give them a gun, and have them be able to make that split decision."
Sixteen states – including Virginia – currently prohibit staff from having firearms in school. Over 30 states, however, do allow educators to carry a weapon, but many have restrictions and stipulations
https://www.foxnews.com/us/school-shootings-nationwide-20-communities-struggle-safety-measures
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9 May, 2023
Education Choice Empowers Californian Families Facing Continuous School Closures
After the pandemic lockdowns, it seemed schools and their employees would do anything to stay open. But recent school closures due to strikes in large California school districts show that the traditional public education system is not prioritizing students' academic and social well-being.
In March, two Los Angeles-based K-12 employee unions, in solidarity, closed Los Angeles Unified schools for three days when the district rejected the service employees union's demands which included a 30 percent pay increase. Eventually, a tentative agreement was reached that gave service employees in the school district their 30 percent raise and allowed the teachers union to continue negotiating their own new deal. Just last week, 88 percent of the Oakland Education Association members who are employees in the school district authorized a strike to shut down Oakland Unified Schools. The strike started May 4th and will continue for the foreseeable future if the district does not meet its demands, which include a 23 percent pay raise, installation of drought-resistant shrubbery, and many other wants laid out in a 7-page common goods list.
In both cases, the unions deliberately excluded students and their families from these negotiations, but that's no surprise. The public education system has rewarded unions that dispossessed students of academic instruction and services for years. Unless state legislators make education choice options available for Californians, many students will continue to suffer from the union's manipulation of the system.
Over the past thirty years, there have been 75 work stoppages by K-12 public employees, with a third of those strikes occurring in the last five years. The uptick in strikes is primarily due to what Derrell Bradford, the President of 50CAN, calls a "Rolling National Teacher Strike," where the K-12 public sector unions have consistently been rewarded for closing down schools.
For example, in January 2019, the United Teachers of Los Angeles went on strike for an entire week. The district responded by giving the union a six percent pay increase and smaller class sizes. A similar story happened this past March when that same union joined the local K-12 service employees union in closing schools down for another three days. Following the strike, the union used students' learning as a bargaining chip to allow them to receive a 21 percent pay raise over the next three years without giving any assurance the union would not close schools again shortly.
But more school closures are the last thing any Californian student needs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, California closed its schools for a significantly longer period of time than many other states nationwide, and students are still experiencing the harm from these overextended school closures, both socially and academically.
For instance, California's fourth graders experienced a learning loss worth nearly six years of gains in Math and English Language proficiency. School closures also create fundamental dilemmas for working parents, many of whom struggle to get by in the current economic climate, as parents cannot afford to take unpaid leave or be forced to underwrite the union's strike with PTO. Still, despite leaving families high and dry, these unions have been rewarded with millions of dollars of compensation and new legislation at the state level to potentially increase teacher salaries by fifty percent over the next seven years.
Nonetheless, these strikes have resulted in many students leaving public schools permanently in favor of learning pods, private schools, microschool, and other alternative learning models. For many families sick of routinely being subjected to the whims of K-12 employee unions, alternative education models free of union interests offer more reliability and educational stability. But all too often, these options are financially out of reach. Wealthier families can usually choose the best education option for their students — whether by living in a nicer neighborhood with better public schools or paying out of pocket for private education. However, the same cannot be said for students from lower-income families who can't always afford private education.
Education Saving Accounts (ESAs) can level the playing field by giving all families access to a sum of per-pupil spending designated for their child's education — in California, that's nearly $17,000 a year as of 2020. ESAs are the gold standard of education choice legislation, granting families the necessary funds to provide for their child's unique educational needs, including school tuition, private tutoring, special needs therapies, or trade skills. Moreover, a recent Georgia Public Policy Foundation study found that ESAs result in "higher lifetime earnings and increased academic achievement."
California currently lacks an ESA or any private school choice legislation. State legislators must propose and pass an ESA in the next legislative session to give students and their families a fighting chance. If they do, all California students stand to benefit as each student, no matter their background, can finally escape the union's grasp.
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We Have To Hold Our Children Close
The Left's hysterical claims about so-called “book bans” doesn't make any sense because, as always, the people making the claims aren't being honest about their true concerns. The real issue here is that we are trying to exercise control over the material that our children are exposed to — they don't want us stepping between our children and them.
President Biden made the agenda clear during a speech in the Rose Garden yesterday, meant to honor the 2023 national and state teachers of the year:
"There is no such thing as someone else's child, the president declared. Your child is not your child. Your child belongs to everyone."
You might like to think that Biden doesn't mean this literally, that it's just a meaningless platitude. But remember that he belongs to the same party that just passed this law in Washington State. The New York Post reports:
“A Washington State bill that would strip parents' rights to intervene on their kids' medical care in certain circumstances passed the House Wednesday, clearing its pathway to being signed by Gov. Jay Inslee.
'An act relating to supporting youth,' or Senate Bill 5599, allows host homes for runaway youth 'to house youth without parental permission.'
Furthermore, the host homes do not need to notify parents about where their kids are or if they are getting medical interventions 'if there is a compelling reason not to, which includes a youth seeking protected health services.'
The 'protected health care services' included 'gender-affirming care,' which for minors arbitrarily included anything prescribed by a doctor to treat dysphoria, the bill said. 'Gender affirming treatment can be prescribed to two-spirit, transgender, nonbinary, and other gender diverse individuals,' the bill stated.
Another 'compelling reason' not to notify parents about kids staying in a host home was 'circumstances that indicate notifying the parent or legal guardian will subject the minor to abuse or neglect.’”
In other words, if a child in Washington state decides that he wants to undergo a medical gender transition, and his parents object, all he has to do is run away from home, land at one of these “host homes,” and from there his parents will be stripped of all rights to protect him from being sterilized and butchered.
Keep in mind that refusing to affirm your child's gender confusion, telling him that he's really a boy even though he thinks he's a girl, counts as “abuse and neglect” according to the people who write laws like this.
This is how they will, and have already begun, to, strip rights away from parents across the country and induct children into the gender cult by force. First they set the stage by declaring that a lack of affirmation is abusive. Then they “come to the rescue” by extracting the children from those “abusive” homes and leaving them in the arms of the state, where they can be shaped and molded — in a literal, physical sense — and made into the sort of person that the system wants them to be.
So who exactly is consenting to the procedure in a case where the parent has been cut out completely? The child cannot consent. The parent does not consent. Who is authorizing this?
The answer is that the parent is authorizing it, because a new parental figure has been appointed. Joe Biden said that our nation's children are all of our children.
But we already know from extensive experience that when anyone on the Left uses the word “our” or “us” or “we” they do not mean it in a general collective sense. This is an “us” that does not include you.
“Us” means the system, the institutions, the powers that be. “Our nation's children are all our children” means that “our nation's children are the system's children.” It will raise your child. It will decide what is best for him. It will take charge of his formation — both physical and moral.
As should be clear to everyone by now, the family unit is the greatest threat to the system. It is the Left's greatest enemy. The Left hates local authority, militating against localization in every form. It wants you to be totally subject to overarching, inhuman bureaucratic powers.
It wants your life to be run by institutions that do not know you, do not love you, and do not recognize you as a distinct individual. And the most localized structure, the most local form of authority, is the family.
In a healthy family, the members all look to each other for love, guidance, purpose. This makes them much harder to influence, harder to control.
And so the family must be destroyed, and all of the vibrant and fulfilling bonds that define it — the bond between husband and wife, the bond between parent and child — must be severed and replaced by the lifeless, empty bond between subject and system, where the subject can be unmade and remade in the image of the institutions that wish to control his life.
That is what they intend to do to you and especially to your children. And it's why we have to hold our children close, and never allow it.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.pol-incorrect/c/goCt-IgNvNc
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Bill would end early, legacy admissions at NY colleges, universities
State lawmakers are eyeing a ban on the practice of early admission to colleges and universities as the legislative session nears its end, with progressives claiming the practice is racist.
Supporters of a bill that would outlaw early admission — in which prospective students agree to attend their top-choice college in exchange for acceptance earlier in the admission cycle — as well as legacy admissions say both practices disproportionately help white and wealthy students get into prestigious schools like Columbia, NYU, and Cornell.
“The bill seeks to eliminate structural barriers created by legacy and early admissions policies which tend to reward connected and affluent white students and discriminate against students of color and first-generation students like myself,” Assemblywoman Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill in her chamber, said Monday.
Supporters of the legislation aim to get it passed by leveraging opposition to a potential Supreme Court ruling in cases challenging race-based admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
“If the Supreme Court is not going to allow us to use affirmative action to help improve economic and racial diversity on college campuses,” state Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill in his chamber, said Monday, “then we, the state of New York, will not allow the same institutions to use affirmative action for privileged students in picking and choosing which children or grandchildren of their alumni they will choose.”
Supporters of the Albany effort say early admissions are problematic because they require students to commit to a school before they know what financial aid they might get, a situation that data suggests helps white students who tend to be wealthier than those from other groups.
“Applying early decision requires two things. It requires college admissions know-how and money, which may be why students attending private high schools are more than three times more likely than public high school students to apply early decisions,” Gounardes said, referring to a 2022 study by the advocacy group Education Reform Now.
Roughly two-thirds of private school students in New York City are white, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute analysis.
Meanwhile, most of the top universities in the country give some advantage to family members of alumni, who are approximately 45% more likely to win admission compared to non-legacy students with similar qualifications, according to the Century Foundation.
“At a time when universities are seeking to diversify by race and socioeconomic status, legacy preferences, on average, negatively impact minority and low-income students,” Richard Kahlenberg, then a senior fellow at the think tank, wrote in a 2018 letter to Congress.
And while legacy admissions are race-neutral on their face, Kahlenberg wrote at the time, they have roots in policies that replaced admission quotas for groups like Jews.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/08/bill-threatens-early-legacy-admissions-at-ny-colleges/
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8 May, 2023
Christian University Brings Out the Big Guns After Public School District's Underhanded Move
An Arizona school district has reversed its policy of prohibiting Arizona Christian University education students from doing their student teaching in the district.
The board of the Washington Elementary School District, which covers Phoenix and Glendale, changed its stance in Wednesday’s settlement of a lawsuit filed by Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of ACU two months ago.
In February, the district’s governing board, which KSAZ-TV said has three LGBT members, voted 5-0 to end the district’s 11-year relationship with the university because of the university’s beliefs in Christian values, specifically in the area of sexuality and marriage, according to an ADF news release.
The break came despite no reports of complaints regarding the behavior of ACU student teachers.
“By discriminating against Arizona Christian University and denying it an opportunity to participate in the student-teacher program because of its religious status and beliefs, the school district was in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention state law that protects ACU’s religious freedom,” David Cortman, ADF senior counsel and vice president of U.S. litigation, said in a statement.
“At a time when a critical shortage of qualified, caring teachers exists, the Washington Elementary School District board did the right thing by prioritizing the needs of elementary school children and agreeing to partner once again with ACU’s student-teachers,” said Cortman, who represented ACU in federal district court.
As part of the settlement with ACU, the board agreed to pay $25,000 in attorneys’ fees.
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Children targeted by WHO ‘Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe’
The World Health Organisation has orchestrated a ‘framework for policy makers, educational and health authorities and specialists’ titled, Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe.
Its purpose is to standardise (in other words override) the diverse teaching practices of each sovereign nation within Europe and the wider international community with regards to sexual education.
Having all-but forced European nations to comply, the United Nations is seeking to expand a similar framework to all UN member states – including Australia. This framework is called International Guidance on Sexuality Education, produced as part of UN Education 2030 and counter-signed by UNICEF. The WHO are now actively promoting the framework. In mid-April of 2023, the Commission on Population and Development failed to reach a consensus on advancing the strategy, providing a reprieve … for now.
‘Nobody is happy with this result,’ said a spokesperson representing Senegal. They went on to point out that people come from different ‘horizons and realities’ and that the commission must ‘respect all cultures’. The problem with communist-style policy is that it demands a uniform approach with identical ideological outcomes irrespective of culture.
And what sort of ‘vision’ does the WHO have in mind for the world’s children?
Their preferred framework demands that sex education begin at birth and be guided by the State via the relentless work of educators instead of the current model of parent-led development with catch-up assistance from schools.
European countries have already begun integrating the WHO agenda into their curricula with Germany, for example, using the WHO document ‘widely’ for ‘development and revision, advocacy work, and training educators’.
Quite frankly, the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe is a ‘rapey’ document that reads like the mind of a child-fiddling psychopath given control of public health.
The UN document makes their intention very clear that:
‘This framework aims to empower children and young people to develop respectful social and sexual relationships. These skills can help children and young people form respectful and healthy relationships with family members, peers, friends and romantic or sexual partners.’
The Framework also teaches children what consent consists of, meaning they assume a child can content to sex.
The WHO lays out its reason for teaching children aged 0-6 the detail of biological reproduction – that is, children who are still young enough to believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. By age 6, the WHO wants the education industry – and presumably their teachers – to expose children to the concepts of intercourse, masturbation, and pornography. By age 9, they are expected to reach an ‘adult’ knowledge of sex including teaching of masturbation and viewing of online pornography. At age 12 – remembering that we are still talking about young children – the WHO wishes the official European education course to explore political and emotional responses to sex, puberty, and gender.
Starting sex education at birth is an indication of the mindset of these people. 0-4 year-olds should be able to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual sexual interaction and develop a ‘positive attitude’ to the different sexual lifestyles of adults.
These standards, if you can call them that, form part of an initiative launched by the WHO Regional Office for Europe in 2008 and were further developed by the Federal Centre for Health Education with the collaboration of 19 ‘experts’ from Western European countries.
In their own words, it was created as part of a ‘new need’ for sexual education ‘triggered by various developments during the past decades’. These include ‘globalisation and migration of new population groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds, the rapid spread of new media, particularly the internet and mobile phone technology, the emergence and spread of HIV/AIDS, increasing concerns about the sexual abuse of children and adolescents and, not least, changing attitudes towards sexuality and changing sexual behaviour among young people’.
It sounds as though bad parenting, incompatible cultural practices, and a lacklustre policing of child abuse is being used as an excuse to do away with fundamental child protection standards and the innocence of children that the West used to pride itself in.
The original argument for introducing basic levels of sex education into the school system centred around child safety. These courses were designed as a catch-up, particularly for young girls who had reached an age where it was possible for them to get pregnant, to ensure they understood reproductive essentials in order to protect themselves. The point was to avoid dangerous adolescent pregnancies and abuse – not to encourage sexual behaviour in minors.
Now it appears that adults seeking affirmation for their sexual choices are flooding the education system with age-inappropriate content that is being solidified through the edicts of unelected global bureaucracies such as the WHO.
In this case, the education framework points out that there is an increase in the spread of sexual diseases among children and a rise in teen pregnancies across Europe – but what the report does not explain is that this is largely being seen among migrant demographics after coming from cultures where the abuse and sexualisation of children is common compared to European standards.
There are countless articles detailed a doubling of child abuse in recent years, with some publications describing Europe as ‘a hub of child abuse material’ and Save the Children reporting that child migrants are being ‘systematically abused by police, people smugglers, and other adults’.
It could be argued that policies, like that of former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and her 2015 ‘refugee pledge’ encouraging Europe to open the floodgates to mass migration (and thus the escalation of people smuggling rings) is largely to blame for the danger children in Europe now face.
The solution would seem obvious: focus on the integration of migrant communities into the established moral order of European nations and severely punish adults who carry on illegal practices imported from their homelands while enforcing extreme criminal penalties on people smugglers and the police who assist them.
Above all, you might imagine that parents and the education system would seek to shelter children from the sexual world in their formative years to ensure the cycle of degeneracy was broken.
That is not what is being proposed by the WHO.
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Australian Federal Budget 2023: Funding for 5000 teaching scholarships and new ad campaign
Typical Leftism: They think that they can solve a problem by throwing money at it. Tackling the feral environment in classrooms that their discipline policies have created does not even occur to them. It occurs to those considering a teaching career, though
Five thousand teaching students will be offered up to $40,000 each if they stay in the classroom and a $10 million advertising blitz to recruit new teachers will be launched by the Federal Government in a bold bid to tackle crippling school shortages.
The moves come in the wake of News Corp’s groundbreaking Australia’s Best Teachers and Best in Class campaign, which Education Minister Jason Clare said had already made teachers feel more valued and respected and inspired the government’s follow-up campaign.
The Minister has just returned from a high-level international gathering of 22 international education ministers in Washington DC, where he was alarmed to discover fewer than half of Australian teachers felt their work was valued, well behind countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Korea, Finland and even Mexico.
In an exclusive interview with News Corp, Mr Clare revealed the 5000 $10,000 scholarships would be included in next week’s Budget – making good on an election promise.
However they will now be tied to teaching graduates committing to serve a number of years in the classroom, most likely five – a condition teachers themselves urged the Minister to place on the scholarships in order to boost flagging retention rates.
It is part of a broader government push to elevate the status of teachers to that of other professionals and attract the highest performing students to the nation’s schools.
“There’s nothing more important in a classroom than the teacher shaping the outcomes for our kids,” he said.
“These are 5000 scholarships worth up to 40 grand each. They encourage some of our best and brightest to become a teacher rather than a lawyer or a banker and applications for those scholarships will open later this year.”
Following the success of our education advocacy campaign, Mr Clare will also later this year launch a multimillion-dollar recruitment drive in partnership with the states and territories.
The $10m campaign – $5m of which will be provided by the Commonwealth and $5m by the states – will take inspiration from a powerful ad Mr Clare saw in the New York subway 20 years ago, long before he even entered parliament.
The billboard simply read: “Everybody remembers their first teacher’s name. Who will remember yours?”
“We’re developing that campaign now with teachers and principals,” Mr Clare said.
“We’re bringing them together to help us design this campaign, which will involve TV, social media, but also ads on the back of buses and taxis and billboards.”
The Minister said the comparative data he saw at the US conference showed there was a clear link between teachers feeling valued and teacher shortages and was alarmed that only around 38 per cent of Australian teachers believed they were valued by society.
“In countries like Singapore and Finland, where there is no shortage of teachers at all – in fact people are queuing up to become a teacher – that percentage is more like 60 or 70 per cent,” he said.
“So that data underlies the importance of the campaign.”
However, Mr Clare said the education advocacy campaign and his own personal determination to place teachers front and centre of education reform had already started to turn around this attitude.
“It’s important for me to get on the record, to say thank you to News Corp for this campaign, it’s really important,” he said.
“We’ve got a teacher shortage crisis in the country, that’s been building for a long time. And if we’re going to recruit more great teachers and retain more great teachers, then that starts with respect. And that’s what this campaign at its core is all about.”
But Mr Clare also stressed: “It’s a whole of community job. It’s not just the job of ministers, and the media, it’s the whole community pulling together. Because if we respect teachers, we’re going to get more of them.”
The Australia’s Best Teachers campaign launched in February to help change perceptions about the role of teachers, many of who feel the public does not respect the work they do. Major organisations ANZ, Teachers Mutual Bank, Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools, Care For Kids, Griffith University and PwC have also backed the campaign.
Samantha Brimfield, a teacher at Santa Sophia Catholic College at Gables in Sydney’s northwest, said it was a rewarding career.
“You develop such beautiful relations and connections with the students and families you work with,” said Miss Brimfield, who features in The Daily Telegraph’s list of Australia’s Best Teachers on Saturday.
“You are not just a teacher, you are someone your students look up to and are inspired by. It is a special feeling knowing you have made an impact on a child’s life and that you have the ability to leave a lasting impression.”
Miss Brimfield said it was important the public valued and respected the work of teachers.
“How the community views teachers can have an influence on student’s and their attitudes and feelings towards school,” she said.
“Schools that have a great partnership with their wider community help to create a sense of belonging within the families and students and aids in creating a positive learning environment.”
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7 May, 2023
Parents Get Back in Charge of Their Children’s Education
Parents in the pandemic era have asserted themselves with new vigor for the sake of their children. Parents no longer presume that the zoned public school is the right fit, or that the school puts students first.
Nor do parents presume that most teachers wish to reproduce the values of the community. Since 2020, Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 education has plummeted.
Their skepticism is warranted: All too many schools seek to undermine, destroy, and rebuild American society in a revolutionary, neo-Marxist image.
Outrageous? Yes. Believable? Yes, as documented by the stories in a new Pacific Research Institute book. “The Great Parent Revolt: How Parents and Grassroots Leaders Are Fighting Critical Race Theory in America’s Schools,” by Lance Izumi and co-authors, provides a dozen accounts from around the country.
Many parents will be able to see themselves in these stories. The point is to inspire more parents to advocate for a high-quality education that doesn’t divide students by race, ethnicity, and other characteristics in order to tear apart American society.
By that measure, this book admirably succeeds. What the parents in these stories have done is not so difficult, and organizations of concerned parents are now all over the country, ready to empower and equip newcomers.
Polls consistently show that when people learn what critical race theory is, they generally dislike it. But if you come to this book thinking that the only problem is CRT, be prepared to learn that the real situation is worse. The book focuses significant attention on critical race theory, but the bigger culprit is critical theory generally, with its roots in a Marxist binary of class warfare.
Indeed, many American schools are focused not merely on the oppressed-oppressor binary regarding race, but also regarding sex and the usual list of identities. If you are “oppressed” in multiple ways (for example: a black overweight gay woman), then congratulations, you have intersectional oppression (described in Chapter 3). The various categories of the oppressed commonly are expected to act in solidarity to smash and rebuild American society, culture, and government.
So, I recommend lingering on the treatment of ethnic studies in chapters 2 and 8—this field is not merely “a Trojan horse for CRT,” the authors note, but problematic in additional ways—such as its frequent antisemitism.
In the proposed California curriculum, notably, critical ethnic studies or liberated ethnic studies is the dominant branch of the subject. Proponents of this “militant” doctrine teach an extreme version of the victim-oppressor binary: They all too often dismiss leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. for being too “docile”; they reject math, capitalism, private property, and sometimes even money as oppressive; and they call for completely reworking society.
Ironically, one parent notes: “Critical or Liberated Ethnic Studies has predetermined outcomes. They’re not teaching kids to think critically.”
Even so, it is fair that this book focuses primarily on race, because race is the most prevalent victim-oppressor binary. Also, the authors are fully correct to observe that teaching critical race theory means teaching the tenets or principles of CRT; a lesson doesn’t need to be titled “Critical Race Theory” to count. Not just ethnic studies but also social and emotional learning and other innocent-sounding pedagogies have become infused with CRT.
The story of Gabs Clark and her son is one of many showing that any alert parent can fight back successfully. If a school compels a student to reveal his personal opinions, forces him to say he’s an oppressor because of his race, sex, or religion, and tries to get him to change, he has a good chance of succeeding in court. (Thanks to the Liberty Justice Center for taking her son’s case.)
After Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, complained of having too many Asian students and revolutionized admissions to get the numbers down, parent Asra Nomani publicly criticized this racism by Fairfax County Public Schools. Nomani became an activist, founded the Coalition for TJ, and sued the school board with the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation. She won.
With smoking-gun documents that can be found with requests under open-records laws, other parents can win, too. As the judge wrote in the Virginia case, quoting earlier cases, “racial balancing for its own sake is ‘patently unconstitutional.’” (The decision is on hold pending an appeal.)
A lawsuit is far from the only option. Exit is another.
The student story of Joshua (not his real name) is one of several chapters showing divisive “diversity, equity, and inclusion” activities in action. Students were to reveal their personal and sexual preferences, and the programming used racial stereotypes to divide students from one another.
Joshua saw what happened to students who spoke out—a “horrific outbreak of screaming”—so he self-censored. Greater education freedom would permit more students to leave hostile environments such as Joshua’s.
Another activist, Xi Van Fleet, grew up in revolutionary China and exited that environment, but she sees commonalities with America today. Most notable is the proliferation of “bias reporting” protocols that encourage students to inform on one another to the authorities.
In the bias reporting program at Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools, students inform on each other anonymously. Van Fleet adds that one study found that 80% of K-12 students “never heard about the Chinese Cultural Revolution,” and it shows.
In Rhode Island, Nicole Solas fought back by calling for transparency. She had enrolled her daughter in a local kindergarten, but in 2020 the school went hard into critical race theory. After she wrangled this confession from the principal, she filed about 160 open-records requests for the details.
The local school board publicly considered suing Solas, apparently hoping to hide the documents. Instead of fulfilling their public mission, school boards all too often inflate the costs of fulfilling record requests and prevent parents from speaking at meetings.
In fact, the National School Boards Association even enlisted the federal government to declare outspoken parents to be terrorist threats.
Although her local school board ultimately declined to sue Solas, the teachers union did sue her. She fought back with help from the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, and the union withdrew its complaint.
Solas also sued the school district, accusing it of “holding meetings for the district’s racial advisory board in secret,” in violation of Rhode Island’s Open Meetings Act.
Solas’ case is rare, though—records requests by parents often work without lawsuits. And another route to transparency is legislation. More and more states require that course materials be posted online or that parents be allowed to review these materials in person.
Another way to get school and school board records is to run for school board and win. Amazingly, many parents are doing just that. Even San Francisco voters recalled (fired) some of their worst school board members.
One political action committee, the 1776 Project PAC, claims to have “flipped” more than 100 school boards or school board seats since 2021, while Moms for Liberty (see below) successfully endorsed dozens of candidates and flipped seven more districts.
These parents now can use their power for good. After Mari Barke won a school board seat in Orange County, California, she held public forums that exposed critical race theory in schools and demonstrated how CRT often is unlawful because it discriminates on the basis of race.
After Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich each won board seats in their Florida districts, they formed Moms for Liberty to educate and empower parents, fight critical race theory, and promote equal opportunity. They also call for high standards instead of the lower standards needed to produce “equity” (characteristically resulting in more similar outcomes by race but worse outcomes overall, as Joshua’s story relates).
The hard work by Justice and Descovich has led to about 275 chapters with a total of 115,000 members, by recent count. If a parent isn’t sure where to go, Moms for Liberty is one great place to begin (or Parents Defending Education, which also files free speech lawsuits, or other organizations mentioned in the book).
Parents don’t have to do all this work alone. Many teachers, for example, do agree with the resisting parents and can be allies and whistleblowers—they are, the book says, “as frustrated as the public about the counterproductive thought indoctrination going on in public education.”
Meanwhile, Izumi and the other authors add, “grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and other ordinary Americans are also on the front line” defending American freedom and opportunity against critical theory.
Notably, Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, says he also finds support from moderate Democrats who oppose the revolutionaries (often confidentially, because of progressive bullying).
This kind of solidarity will be hard to beat.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/28/parents-get-back-in-charge-of-their-childrens-education/
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Rescuing Our Kids From Public School's Pleasure Island
There is a terrifying logic to the leftist infiltration of our public schools. If they control the minds of children, they have their hooks in the future of the country. Aside from the multitude of evils that this is already producing (transgenderism, critical race theory, environmental cultists), kids are failing academically. This is particularly true in the arenas of history and civics.
History and civics actually got the lowest scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — i.e. the Nation's Report Card — when the test was given to eighth-graders. These represent the lowest scores since the test was first administered in the 1990s. Only 13% of eighth-graders were proficient in civics, and only 20% were proficient in history. Math and reading scores dropped to a distressing level as well. However, history and civics — the subjects dealing with culture and the world — achieving the lowest scores is especially telling.
The Biden administration has blamed the low scores on the pandemic and Republicans. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: "Kids have lost so much in the pandemic. This is why, when the president walked in, he made [it] ... a priority to open schools." This particular delusion about President Joe Biden being in a hurry to open schools is revisionist history, but the bigger issue at hand is that this score decline has been developing for years now.
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Commissioner Peggy Carr has been doing research on the NEAP scores in her job within the Department of Education. According to her findings, these latest scores have made her "very, very concerned, because it's a decline that started in 2014 long before we even thought about Covid." She goes on to correctly demand that teachers get this material in front of the kids.
Knowing our Constitution, how our government is supposed to work, and the U.S.'s story within history are all vitally important so that our next generation of voting citizens is informed and educated.
When it comes to failing students in general and these two subjects in particular, there are many elements at play. There is the political (boards of education and activist teachers), there is the cultural (the sort of environment at play within the schools), and there is the individual student.
Let's start with the political. When a growing number of people with the power to influence and teach history and civics are increasingly anti-America and anti-Western culture, they are not going to be able to teach these subjects well. As The Wall Street Journal points out: "Dropping scores reflect the falling quality of history and civics lessons taught in American schools, which has been fueled by political acrimony. ... Teachers have said controversies over the content of lessons have damped morale. These subjects are considered hard to staff in many districts, according to teachers union officials."
Who has made teaching this material difficult? The anti-America teachers have made it difficult by actively teaching children to hate their country and all that we have built as a nation. The woke teachers unions, school boards, and school administrators have made it difficult by threatening conservative teachers and dictating what they can and cannot say.
On a cultural level, as our Brian Mark Weber wrote back in 2017: "Universities today are more interested in turning students into political activists than knowledgeable citizens who value the ideals upon which our country was founded. As a result, Americans have a lot to say about 'rights' that their teachers and professors have conjured up, but they know nothing about the rights in the Constitution."
Then there is the challenge of the individual student. History and civics are two of those subjects that some kids really struggle with. A good teacher can get them to engage, but even so, in this instant-answer-in-your-pocket age, the information doesn't necessarily stick.
Then there is the whole other problem that no one outside of the teaching profession is willing to speak out about: Student behavior.
Teaching is a work of heart, but many of these students are straight-up hooligans. These kids have been allowed to do whatever they want. They have no respect for authority and they have no boundaries or consequences that are meaningful or corrective to their abhorrent behavior. This is cause for a high burnout rate amongst teachers. Who wants to teach angry rude student who don't want to learn?
These next two generations of kids in the public schools are looking and behaving like the kids in "Pinocchio" who run away from home and go to Pleasure Island. Those kids are allowed to do whatever they want — break every taboo, hurt one another — and eventually the kids are turned into donkeys. Our culture and political overlords are creating this Pleasure Island-type mentality for students and literally turning them into Democrat donkeys and ignorant jackasses.
There are several solutions available to parents. You can take your kids out of public school and try private or charter schools. Homeschooling is also a great option. Hope is not lost if parents are invested in educating their children in these subjects. Lead by example and make history and civics come alive for your children. And above all, emphasize the importance of being an intelligent and discerning person.
Our government has shown through its public schools what it is willing to do to ideologically and morally kidnap your students. It's time to stop letting them get away with it. Our kids are too important.
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Educators Report Spike in Student Behavioral Problems Since Lockdowns
Last year, a study released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 40 percent of teenagers reported feeling “sad or hopeless” during the pandemic. This was a time where schools closed their doors, forcing students to finish their classes online and be separated from their classmates. Some states kept students from in-person learning into the fall.
Lockdowns had devastating impacts on America’s youth, including massive learning loss. And, a study published recently found that students misbehaving escalated after lockdowns, according to educators.
A study published late last month by the EdWeek Research Center found that seventy percent of educators, including over 1000 teachers, principals and school district leaders, said that students are misbehaving more than in fall 2019 – right before pandemic lockdowns. One-third of educators specifically said that students are misbehaving “a lot more.”
In December 2021, 66 percent of educators surveyed said that their students were misbehaving “more or a lot more” compared with fall of 2019.
In a January study, 80 percent of educators said since the pandemic students have been less motivated to do their best in school. One-third of all educators said that the students, schools, anand school districts were unmotivated. Sixty-eight percent of educators said their students’ morale was lower than before the pandemic.
Crystal Thorpe, the principal of Fishers Junior High School in Indiana, told The Hill that last year was the worst year for student behavior she’d seen at her school, including fights and other kinds of aggressive behavior. Thorpe gathered all her faculty together last year to come up with a game plan to handle it.
“I think it’s because we just — we paid more attention to it because I think as a staff, we were all exhausted last year, and we were talking about ‘OK, what’s going on? How do we better address this? How do we handle this?’ And I think for this year, we’ve actually got a much better handle on it because we knew that it was a problem last year,” she said.
"It’s no surprise that after forcing kids to learn at home for months on end, they may have forgotten how to behave in a classroom. When kids finally returned to school, administrators began swapping any sort of punitive disciplinary practices for ‘restorative justice’ or ‘healing circles.’
These practices sound nice, and they make administrators sound like kind, caring community builders. In reality, these practices and the administrators that use them are an absolute sham. They create unproductive learning environments and fail to prepare children for life outside of the classroom," Alex Nester, an investigative fellow with Parents Defending Education, told Townhall. "‘Restorative’ practices destroy school infrastructure that instilled students with integrity, urgency, and discipline. But it’s easier for administrators to use ‘restorative’ practices than actually discipline students. And as a result, our classrooms are a mess."
In addition to misbehaving students, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found last year that math and reading scores among 9-year-olds fell across all race and income levels in the past two years, though they were significantly worse among low-ranking students. Those in the 90th percentile showed a 3 percent drop in math scores, while students in the 10th percentile fell 12 points, which Leah covered. Average 9-year-old scores declined the most on record for math (seven points) and in reading since 1990 (five points).
National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr said that “school shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services,” in response to the numbers. She did not acknowledge how students not attending school at all contributed to the learning loss.
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5 May, 2023
Homeschool, if you can
One of the biggest benefits of homeschooling is the healthy distance home education puts between politics, their peers, and our kids.
We live in an era where government is God and its priesthood is post-modernist partisan activism. A time when parents are told to rest the responsibility of raising their children in the hands of ‘socialisation’, sporting clubs, or sexualised peers groomed through pornography, propaganda, and sociopathic social media.
This is a time when knowledge is on tap, soured by incoherence and confusion. A time when feeling good trumps doing good because the God-fearing love of many has grown cold.
We live in a time when experts like big media, Big Pharma, and big government, tell us what to think, when to act, what to say, and what pill to take to keep the manufactured monsters at bay.
A time when we’re told – without regard for the irony – that the only absolute truth is that absolute ‘truths’ don’t exist.
A time when neighbour will denounce neighbour for not using the ‘correct’ pronoun.
A time when family members will bear false witness against family members – accusing them of racism, or bigotry – for honestly refusing to live under condemnation because they’re heterosexual, have a big family, or were born with ‘white’ skin.
Some would say the whole idea of living by lies being a loving act, is indicative of the fact we’ve entered a dystopian society without realising it.
A society ruled by the drugs of comfort, pleasure, ‘niceness’, victim cults, and nanny state safetyism.
On par with Chinese Communism, the political incursion into our children’s spaces is already taking place.
One local Church-owned centre near me doesn’t consider itself Christian.
Educators cannot teach Christian kids the gospel, nor are they allowed to do Christian art and craft for fear of being wrapped over the knuckles by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) thought police.
They’re not allowed to read to kids moral stories grounded in Biblical truths that have been the glue of good government (and civil unity in Western Civilisation) for centuries.
To illustrate how skewed the ‘sector’s’ political priorities are, daycare kids can recite the 70s-era Welcome to Country, but not Advance Australia Fair or the Lord’s Prayer.
To add, I was recently told that daycare educators are being forced to refer to their industry as a ‘sector’.
Their educators, regardless of age, level of certification, and experience, are to be ambiguously referred to as ‘professionals’.
In a way this diabolical political newspeak somewhat makes sense.
The Childcare ‘sector’, with its large amount of government funding, has become – and is becoming – another branch of our country’s bloated bureaucracy.
Instead of empowering mums and dads, I would argue that these changes give government more power over parents.
For instance, if these new Orwellian government employees, dressed up as daycare workers, say water is no longer wet, or that 2 + 2 no longer equals 4, who are parents to argue?
After all, these workers – some of whom are childless and fresh out of school – are parenting ‘professionals!’
With the penchant for replacing playtime and education with indoctrination, it turns out Australian daycares, really aren’t about caring for kids at all.
Consider how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – all part of the mentally unstable Woke ideology – excludes Christian kids from celebrating and learning about Christian holidays with their friends.
What this turn towards 1984 looks like, is a seditious scheme to replace parents with parenting professionals.
Mum and dad replaced by the non-gender specific all-powerful state.
To paraphrase Roger Scruton, it’s only when we examine the roots behind these changes, that we begin to ‘find refuge from the demon’.
Pre-empting the Woke apocalypse, the late great the British philosopher, declared:
‘Vulgar relativism has no hope of surviving outside the minds of ignorant rascals.
‘The writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.’
Homeschool where you can, when you can, and if you can.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/homeschool-if-you-can
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Biden Admin to Investigate School for Hosting Event Only Allowing Girls and ‘Gender Diverse’ Students
This week, the Biden administration opened an investigation into a Pennsylvania school district after a parental rights organization filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education because the school district hosted a STEM event solely for “girls and gender diverse students.”
In March, Townhall exclusively reported how the organization Parents Defending Education filed a federal civil rights complaint against Lower Merion School District in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. According to documents obtained by PDE and shared with Townhall, the school district hosted an academic event called “the inaugural Girls+ STEM Night.” The event is meant to “expose younger girls and gender diverse students to various STEM-related careers and fields in hopes that it will spark an interest to pursue science, technology, engineering and math inside and outside of the classroom” and promised to hold future events of the same nature.
“By its plain terms…only some students may attend this school program. It excludes others — and this exclusion is based solely on an individual’s sex,” PDE told Townhall. “As for the future ‘girls and gender diverse’ programming and networking opportunities, that too would confer a benefit on the basis of sex not offered to all students.”
The letter outlining the complaint noted that discrimination on the basis of sex violates Title IX, which states that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
This week, the OCR sent a letter to PDE stating that an investigation would take place for Title IX violations.
“You allege that the District discriminates against students on the basis of sex because it offers Girls + STEM Night, which was open only to girls and gender diverse students. OCR also enforces Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and its implementing regulation, 34 C.F.R. Part 106 (Title IX), which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex by recipients of Federal financial assistance. As a recipient of Federal financial assistance from the Department, the District is subject to Title IX and its implementing regulations… CR will investigate this complaint because OCR has jurisdiction and the allegation was filed timely,” the letter said.
Earlier this year, PDE filed a complaint with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights after a public high school in Massachusetts restricted auditions for a school play for students who identify as people of color, which Townhall covered. In February, the organization unveiled documents that exposed a school district in Kansas for hiding students’ gender transitions from parents.
“Lower Merion has been flouting STEM programming on social media that is only open to some elementary students and flagrantly excludes others, based on their biological sex. Title IX protects students from discrimination on the basis of sex,” Caroline Moore, vice president of Parents Defending Education, told Townhall. “All students should be given the same opportunities to thrive, end of story. We hope this will be a reality check for Lower Merion.”
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Student slams school board for allowing violent trans student in bathroom
We are in the midst of a heated debate when it comes to transgender rights and protections in our schools.
Recently, at Martin Luther King High School in Riverside, California, a transgender student was accused of assaulting female students in the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
This has stirred up the conversation surrounding transgender rights in the school system and has many parents and students voicing their concerns.
Megan Simpkins, a senior at MLK High School, recently addressed the Riverside Unified School District Board with her concerns. “I am an 18-year-old high school student and wanted to take this time to bring to your attention the current issue with biological men claiming they are women and in turn, truly believing that they are entitled to use women’s spaces,” she said.
Simpkins continued, “It was infuriating when I had seen the video on social media, but what was detrimental to this is the fact that this man is, and has been using, the women’s restroom and locker room.”
She then asked the board a difficult question: “Why are we affirming the mental confusion of this boy and putting the safety of women in jeopardy by allowing mentally confused men to use the women’s spaces?”
The board received some further insight from another parent. “If anything happens to my daughter and the people in the uniforms come after me because I take care of a guy, now I’m in jail because of the bad things you guys allow to happen.
That’s not cool at all. So now what happens to my daughter? It’s unacceptable. Put yourself in the same situation. Would you guys want your daughter to be beaten down by a guy? Then what would you guys do?”
It’s time for our school board to take a hard stance on this issue and ensure that our students are protected. We can’t allow any student, regardless of gender, to be put in a position of vulnerability.
We need to ensure that our children are safe and protected in school, and that includes protecting them from any potential physical or mental harm. We need to make sure that our schools are not promoting a particular gender identity and instead should be focused on providing a safe learning environment for all students.
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4 May, 2023
‘They Should Be Worried:’ Teachers Union Attempts to Fight Moms Over Parental Rights Advocacy
A Pennsylvania teachers union conference featured a session on fighting parental rights advocacy.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association’s southern region conference last week featured a session on “Combatting Moms for Liberty Attacks on our Teachers and our Schools.”
Moms for Liberty is a grassroots nonprofit organization formed by moms who were former school board members whose members advocate for parental rights in schools across the country.
“Moms for Liberty jumped onto the political scene in 2021 at the height of the pandemic,” the session description says. “Seemingly overnight, an army of parents and community members started showing up at board meetings with a coordinated message, aggressively protesting the teaching of the misnomer ‘critical race theory’ and the wearing of Covid masks.”
Based on Marxist ideology, critical race theory says everything in public and private life must consider racial identities. Moms for Liberty encourages parents to advocate for their children’s education against schools that teach children that America is systemically racist.
With roughly 180,000 members, the Pennsylvania State Education Association is the largest public employee union in the state. It is an affiliate of the National Education Association, the largest labor union in the country.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association gives millions of dollars to Democratic candidates, including $775,000 to Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2022 gubernatorial campaign and more than $1 million to Democratic legislative candidates that year.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said the union’s anti-parent session means her grassroots parental rights organization is on the right track.
“When your enemy names you as their enemy, it looks like we’re right on target,” she told The Daily Signal. “I think the teachers unions are the biggest enemy of public education.”
Moms for Liberty is fighting to reclaim education from teachers unions that prioritize the desires of adults over the needs of children, the mother of four said.
“My view is that the public education system is failing, and that there are many attempts to hide that educational failure from the American public,” Justice said. “But American parents are wise to all of this. What the teachers unions want is not representative of parents and families and teachers.”
Only 3 in 10 Pennsylvania eighth graders are proficient in math, an 11-percentage point decline from 2019, according to National Assessment of Educational Progress data.
Teachers unions falsely pedal the idea that Moms for Liberty is against public education, Justice said.
“Most people don’t fight for things they don’t care about. And we’re fighting for public education,” she said. “We’re going to reclaim it from the teachers unions. And then we’re going to reform it and make it work for kids.”
The presenter of the session, Lauri Lebo, accused Moms for Liberty of “targeting” public education and teachers unions.
“M4L chapters are now targeting school board races across the country and here in Southern Region,” the description says. “This session will explore the dark-money origins of this astroturf organization and its real long-term goal, as well as provide strategies on how to defeat them in the ballot box and at the board meeting.”
Lebo did not respond to questions about the union’s understanding of Moms for Liberty’s true goal. Justice said the long-term goal of her organization “is to defend our parental rights at all levels of government and to reclaim and reform public education.”
“We’re exposing the educational failure happening across the country,” Justice said. “Parents all across the country are making education and parental rights a priority.”
There is no proof that Moms for Liberty is funded by so-called dark money as the union claims, Justice said.
“Union leadership has to lie to teachers about us because if they told the truth, that we really want to help teachers, and we want to make sure kids get what they need at schools, and we want to make sure teachers are paid well to make sure that money isn’t being sucked from them into dues that are used for political action, then they would lose membership,” she explained.
“There are a lot more teachers joining Moms for Liberty than joining unions these days,” Justice said.
Justice and fellow mom Tina Descovich founded Moms for Liberty in 2021 after serving on their local school boards and seeing that schools were not focused enough on children, they said. Moms for Liberty is disrupting the power of teachers unions in public education, Justice stated.
“The teachers unions have had a lot of control and power for a very long time,” she said. “And they recognize the fact that we’re stepping in and we’re taking that control and power away from them.”
“They should be worried.”
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‘We’re Not Doing That Here,’ Oklahoma Schools Superintendent Says of DEI Instruction
Oklahoma is taking a lead on school choice programs and resisting far-left ideology in classrooms across the state.
“It is amazing how aggressive the Biden administration is with this radical agenda towards our schools,” Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, says. When he came into office, Walters says he told staffers there, “We’re not doing diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’re not doing that here.”
The leftist agenda in schools has gone well beyond DEI instruction, and now the Biden administration is considering changing the definition of sex in Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation, opening the door wide for biological boys and men to compete in girls and women’s sports and to use their restrooms and locker rooms.
“We’ve already submitted comment to the Biden administration and told them, ‘We’re suing you if you move down this road,’” Walters said.
Walters joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain the ways Oklahoma is fighting against the Left’s efforts to influence the next generation in the classroom and to discuss the state’s aggressive action to implement school choice programs.
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk expressed his concern about the spread of the so-called “woke mind virus” during a recent interview on HBO’s “Real Time” with Bill Maher
He attributed the rapid spread of wokeness to parents being unaware of the indoctrination happening in public schools and universities.
Musk shared his belief that this issue has been brewing for some time, with the extent of indoctrination in educational institutions far exceeding what parents realize.
He admitted to only recently becoming aware of the problem and emphasized that today’s high school and college experiences differ significantly from those of the past 10 to 20 years.
When Maher inquired whether parents were a significant part of the problem, Musk responded that parents might be in some cases, but the primary issue was their general lack of awareness about what their children are being taught or not being taught in schools.
Musk provided an example from a friend whose daughters attend high school in the Bay Area.
His friend asked his daughters about the first few US presidents, and while they could name George Washington, their knowledge about him was limited to the fact that he was a slave owner. Musk argued that students should have a more comprehensive understanding of historical figures.
This interview highlights Musk’s concern about the infiltration of wokeness in the education system, which he believes has led to the “woke mind virus” spreading rapidly.
By raising awareness about the issue, Musk hopes to encourage parents to take a more active role in understanding what their children are learning in schools and ensuring that they receive a more well-rounded education versus indoctrination.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/elon-musk-issues-dire-warning-parents-public-education
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3 May, 2023
Boy, 12, says he was kicked out of Massachusetts school for wearing shirt that said 'there are only two genders' - because staff said it made pupils feel 'unsafe'
Perish the thought that they one day encounter a real threat to their safety. They are being totally misled about what is safe or unsafe. The school should certainly be warning students about unsafe things -- but only when they are really unsafe. The students could end up missing real threats
I quite admire the student below. I would be proud if he were my kid. He had some very good questions
A Massachusetts middle school student has claimed he was kicked out of school for wearing a t-shirt with words stating that there are only two genders.
Liam Morrison, 12, told the Middleborough School Council on April 13 how his father had to pick him up from John T. Nichols Jr. Middle School the month before when he refused to change out of his t-shirt that read 'There are only two genders.'
He said school officials told him other students were complaining that it made them feel 'unsafe' and was 'disrupting education.'
But by forcing him to change out of the shirt, Morrison claimed the school district was stifling his First Amendment right to free speech.
In his speech to the school board, Morrison said he was taken out of gym class on March 21 to meet with school officials, who told him that people were complaining about his t-shirt, saying it made them feel 'unsafe.'
'They told me that I wasn't in trouble, but I sure felt like I was,' Morrison said of the experience. 'I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class. When I nicely told them I didn't want to do that, they called my father. 'Thankfully, my dad, supportive of my decisions, came to pick me up.
'What did my shirt say?' he continued. 'Five simple words: "There are only two genders." Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.' He added that he did not go to school that day to 'hurt feelings or cause trouble.'
But school officials told him his shirt was 'targeting a protected class.'
'Who is this protected class?' Morrison asked. 'Are their feelings more important than my rights.'
'I don't complain when I see Pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do,' he said.
Morrison also said he was told that 'the shirt was a disruption to learning,' but 'no one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I'm sure I would have noticed if they had.
'I experience disruptions to my learning every day,' he noted. 'Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one and to another?'
The pre-teen added that 'not one person' directly told him they were bothered by the words on his shirt, and in fact, other students told him they supported its message.
But by kicking him out of class, Morrison said, he felt like the middle school was telling him it was not OK for him to have dissenting opinions.
'I have learned a lot from this experience,' he said. 'I learned that a lot of other students share my view. I learned that adults don't always do the right thing or make the right decisions.
'I know that I have a right to wear a shirt with those five words,' Morrison continued. 'Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions and I have a right to express those opinions. Even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.'
'My hope in being here tonight is to bring the School Committee's attention to this issue,' he said. 'I hop that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.
'Next time, it may not only be me,' he concluded. 'There might be more soon that decide to speak out.'
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Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools
Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.
I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.
Davis, who is now euphemistically celebrated as an “activist,” was in fact a loyal apparatchik who served working-class betrayers, some of whom were murderous bureaucrats, and others outright maniacs who defy any normative political description. Among the objects of her adoration were dullards like the East German leader Erich Honecker and the stupefied (and stupefying) Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, as well as the Reverend Jim Jones. Before the grotesque mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, Davis broadcast a worshipful speech about Jones to the imprisoned Black women who were murdered by his cult.
There’s hardly a more famous American communist than Davis, who twice ran for vice president on the CP ticket and stayed true to the party until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For decades, she tirelessly defended the brutalities of the elderly white men who ran the Eastern bloc. Now entering old age herself, Davis has escaped her rightful place doing penance at a memorial to victims of Stalinist tyranny to become a beacon for American millennials who make Soviet-style Black History Month posters. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has named Davis her “idol.” Omar, like rest of her Squad, is cut from Davis’ pattern: Spurning the legions of African American women who stood up for freedom, she instead celebrates a dedicated lifelong bootlicker of communist-bloc tyrants. What redeems Davis, in the eyes of Omar and her fellow progressives, is apparently the fact that she was put on trial for supplying guns to the Black Panthers who murdered hostages during a 1970 shootout.
My son’s school is not the only one with an enthusiasm for Davis. In 2021, City Journal reported on an elementary school in Philadelphia that led fifth graders in a simulated Black Power rally in which they shouted “Free Angela!,” a reference to Davis’ incarceration on murder and conspiracy charges, and adorned the walls of the school with murals of Davis and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Last year, a high school in Rockland County, New York, invited Davis to speak on campus (the speech was canceled due to parental outrage). And the website of the National Women’s History Museum offers a lesson plan—Common Core compliant!—on Davis’ thought, which promises to help students “better make sense of the struggles of women and historically marginalized communities.”
Praise for communists like Davis is a sign of the times. After all, the argument goes, they fought for the oppressed and against the evils of capitalism. A colleague who teaches Russian history tells me that in each class a handful of his students announce that they are communists. The students come equipped with handy rationalizations to explain away monstrous Soviet crimes. They argue, for instance, that Stalin was needed to defeat Hitler; if there had been no Stalin, many more Jews would have died in the Holocaust, so the numbers of Stalin’s dead are outweighed by the people Hitler would have killed.
It’s not just the left that makes excuses for the Soviet regime’s crimes. President Trump claimed that Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 “because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB man, models himself after the Soviet rulers in his paranoid wish to silence dissent, his reliance on political assassination, and his use of military force to establish regional dominance, so it’s no surprise that he sees the communist era as a pinnacle of Russian glory. The official Chinese line on Mao is that he was a great leader who made some errors. No Chinese citizen will dare to discuss Mao’s more striking errors, like the 20 million-plus killed by famine during the Great Leap Forward.
The state of Virginia also officially discourages teaching about the criminal behavior of communist regimes. In February the Virginia Senate’s Democrats killed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have required public schools to teach students about the victims of communism. Public school teachers in Virginia are already required to cover slavery and the Holocaust. So why not communism? Because, a representative of the Virginia teachers union explained, “There is a strong association between communism and Asians,” and so studying communism could lead to anti-Asian hate.
Idiots will attack anyone for any reason—a fact to live with. But the Virginia teachers union explanation is plainly bunk. It seems exceedingly unlikely that high school students, after learning about the many millions of Chinese peasants sacrificed at Mao’s whim, would pin the blame for the dictator’s atrocities on the Chinese American kid sitting next to them in class—perhaps a descendent of one of Mao’s victims.
The reality of course is that the Virginia teachers union is loath to desecrate the memories of their own communist poster boy and poster girl heroes. The real reason for failing to include communism in a history curriculum, one suspects, is that it reflects so poorly on the American left, which has so often made common cause with tyrants so long as they were anti-American, while blaming the right for all forms of “oppression.” If “right-wingers” are all racists and fascists, then it follows that communists were the good guys—even when they were committing mass murder.
We need an antidote to such binary madness, to the blatant manufacturing of alibis for some of the 20th century’s biggest psychotics and political killers and presenting this gross propaganda to children as historical fact. A first step in properly educating our children would be to help students grasp what communism did to the psyches of both its victims and beneficiaries, and how it achieved its murderous ends. Understanding communism as a belief system lets us see why it appeals so much to the progressive left—and what today’s authoritarian left has in common with its murderous ancestors.
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Australia: High school pass marks lowered to under 50 per cent
This does no favours to the students. It just degradates their qualifications
Struggling Year 12 students who fail exams and assignments are still passing maths and English subjects, as state curriculum bodies push down pass marks to below 50 per cent.
In results that raise questions about teaching and syllabus standards, fresh “grade boundary” data from the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) shows that Year 12 students scored a “C” pass-mark in specialist maths with an overall mark of 47 out of 100 last year.
In maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths.
In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100.
And Victoria’s “score ranges’’ for coursework units and written exams for each subject in 2021 reveal students could pass some of the final Year 12 science, maths and English exams despite getting two out of three questions wrong.
Teacher shortages are being blamed for the poor results, as schools struggle to find enough teachers with university qualifications in the hard-to-staff maths and science subjects.
Up to 40 per cent of Australian maths students are being taught by teachers who did not specialise in the subject during their four-year education degree at university.
Senior maths and science academics and teachers warned yesterday that too many students are leaving Year 12 without the necessary maths skills, blaming both teaching standards and the curriculum.
Professor Jennifer Stow, an eminent researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute of Molecular Bioscience, said she was “hugely concerned’’ about falling standards among high school maths graduates and criticised “what is being taught and how it’s being taught’’.
“I think students aren’t being taught enough basics in maths to give them a good underpinning to build upon at a higher education level,’’ she said. “Assignments don’t teach them formulae or maths rules or how to do calculations – they are being assessed on assignments that anyone can mark. They should be drilled on maths rules and formulae, and shown the way to do things.’’
Maths teacher Dr Stephen Norton, who spent 15 years teaching mathematics to trainee teachers at Griffith University before returning to the classroom this year, said many students were finishing primary school without knowing their times tables, long division and multiplication, or fractions. “When they get to high school they’re cactus,’’ he said.
“The biggest problem in secondary school is you get a whole bunch of kids coming to school in Grade 7 with the knowledge of Grade 4 or 5.
Education Minister Jason Clare says children and students aren’t as ready for school or university as they used to…
“For some of them, if you ask, ‘What’s seven multiplied by six?’ they can’t do it.
“They don’t know how to multiply, they haven’t been taught long division and they can’t add or multiply fractions.’’
Dr Norton said high school teachers were required to teach to a detailed curriculum so quickly that they did not have time to help students catch up on basic concepts.
“If you’ve got a struggling kid, or a kid who hasn’t quite got it, they will fall behind quite quickly,’’ he said.
Dr Norton said the best way to improve students’ maths results would be to ensure primary school teachers are given more training to teach the subject. “The primary school teachers are so poorly prepared by universities,’’ he said.
Queensland is the only state to publish subject-level grade boundaries, which show that in maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark for Year 12 last year was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths. In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100. In biology, the lowest pass mark for a C grade was 48, while in chemistry it was 50, and 44 in modern history.
In Victoria in 2021, the pass mark for the final written exam in biology was 108 out of a possible 240 marks – an effective pass mark of 45 per cent.
In chemistry, the lowest score for a C mark was 78 out of 240 – a pass mark of 32 per cent.
Maths methods had a pass score of 50 out of 160 in the mathematical methods exam, revealing that students answered just one in three questions correctly.
In specialist maths, the pass rate for the written exam was 35 out of 80 marks, meaning students could pass despite failing 56 per cent of the questions.
In the English exam, the lowest score was 26 out of 60 marks – a 40 per cent pass rate.
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority did not respond to The Australian’s requests for comment.
A QCAA spokesman said that a grade of C “matches the objectives of the course and is considered ‘satisfactory’.’’
“Every year we look at the achievement of students to determine the grade boundaries,’’ he said. “This involves the QCAA and expert teachers looking at student performance across their range of assessments in every subject to determine cut-offs that align to each reporting standard on a 100-point scale.
“If the range for a C in a subject is 45-64 marks, it is because the student work that received marks in this range demonstrated the attributes of a C standard as described in the syllabus.
Dr Kevin Donnelly, a senior English teacher, curriculum writer and academic who reviewed the national curriculum in 2014, said Australia set a “low bar’’ for education. “We’ve lowered the bar to create a false picture of how well our students are doing and it breeds complacency,’’ he said.
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2 May, 20233
The Fight Over Religious Education: Debates between New York state and its Hasidic community about school choice may offer a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide
The debate in New York state surrounding a state law that requires private and religious schools to provide a curriculum that is “substantially equivalent” to that provided in the local public schools first began in 2015. A group called Young Advocates for Fair Education (YAFFED) petitioned education officials to look into what they claimed was the lack of substantial equivalence at 39 Brooklyn yeshivas for boys located in Hasidic or Haredi neighborhoods. Their complaint resonated with many in New York, including the editorial boards of the city’s three major dailies, who wrote in favor of investigating these schools to assure that their students were getting a full secular education alongside their religious studies. It quickly became an issue of national concern.
On March 23, 2023, a trial court in New York invalidated the enforcement mechanism embedded in these regulations, pointing out that the state’s compulsory education law is meant to be enforced by parents, not schools. It found that a family could be deemed in compliance with compulsory education by sending their children to a religious school while also filing a home-schooling plan with their local district indicating how their children would be meeting the requirements of the substantial equivalence law. It remains to be seen if this ruling will be appealed.
Whatever the outcome in New York, the “substantial equivalency” conflict between those advocating for the rights of parents and those opposing public investment in private education is sure to repeat itself in states like Arizona, West Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas, where recently enacted school choice programs will allow religiously inclined parents to place their children in schools that reflect their practices and beliefs—with public money to follow. The stakes of the debate are considerable, with billions of dollars and the deeply held beliefs of millions of Americans hanging in the balance.
The most recent estimate, from 2019, indicates that over 93,000 students in New York City attended schools considered Hasidic and another 47,000 did so in five counties outside of New York City. Parents freely choose and pay tuition to these schools. It is true that some graduates of these schools have been unhappy with the choices made by their parents, as are some current students and parents. While it is hard to know the exact percentages, it seems to be a relative fraction of the Hasidic community that oppose these education systems.
YAFFED, a group of Hasidic students, graduates, and parents in New York state, argues that parents in these communities face reproach if they opt out of these yeshivas. More importantly, YAFFED believes that the schools fail to provide boys with a sufficient education to prepare them for either college or the world of work. As a result, according to YAFFED, poverty and reliance on public assistance is rampant in Hasidic communities.
It is also true that some Hasidic schools do not offer education in secular subjects and that others attempt to provide the bare minimum with support provided through Federal Title I programs for eligible students. They all provide a classical Jewish education that features intensive instruction in Torah studies and a strong focus on Talmud, in which the boys and young men decipher and analyze competing commentaries on the scriptures in Hebrew and Aramaic. This is not the rote memorization of prayers; it is textual analysis of complex writings. Public schools often adopt “critical thinking” as a goal for their students, but many of them do not ground their students in either enough cultural literacy or advanced thinking skills to meet that goal. Among the three Brooklyn yeshivas I visited, only one does not teach any secular subjects, but its Talmudic studies classes evidenced intense discussion of complex questions related to how people should relate to each other and one’s responsibilities to others in various circumstances. That is a good anchor for raising educated, responsible adults.
These schools also maintain extraordinarily high standards of their own. Some of them expect their students to be fluent Hebrew readers by the end of grade one and test them regularly throughout grade two to gauge their proficiency. The state of New York does not test public school students on English reading proficiency until grade three, and the statewide results are middling at best.
The yeshivas that teach students from Yiddish-speaking homes offer more complicated cases, and the shortcomings in their secular programs yield graduates who are not English proficient. Presumably this limits their ability to interact with the larger secular world, to find certain forms of employment, or to pursue higher secular education without remediation, but one does meet adults who came through these schools and who have gone on to law school or other professional training.
It should also be noted that many Jewish day schools in the modern Orthodox and centrist Orthodox traditions feel that they fulfill their religious obligations with their Talmudic studies while also providing their students with a full range of high-level academic instruction in secular studies. Why are the Hasidic schools in question so insistent in limiting secular studies? As a father of children in such a school explained to me “the answer boils down to the idea that these fleeting early years of education, when children are impressionable and sensitive to everything they see, hear, and are taught, should be grounded in a classical, purely Jewish education.” This principle, they explained, is accentuated by the disintegrating state of society at large; Hasidic parents seek to create and foster a solid Jewish religious foundation during these crucial years of schooling before they enter the world. This traditional form of full immersion in Jewish studies has served their community well through many centuries of trials and tribulations in the diaspora. Contrary to the way these communities have been portrayed, multiple schools serve each Hasidic community, so parents are free to choose the level of secular education they desire for their children.
The question for New York’s education officials now is how to best serve these religious communities who are their constituents. A court has ruled that the state cannot shutter schools which don’t provide a substantially equivalent education, but that they can impose fines or threaten prison to parents who are not ensuring that their children are receiving a substantially equivalent education. Are the state and city education agencies really going to impose sanctions on the many parents who are happy with the educational choices that they have freely made? Some schools might be able to document substantial equivalence with changes at the margins, but those changes will not likely satisfy those most opposed to the educational practices of these schools.
Some schools that offer no secular studies, like the one I visited, may become the locus of a case before the Supreme Court, which in 1972 gave Amish communities an exemption to Wisconsin’s compulsory education law, allowing them to opt their children out of high school, citing the uniqueness and self-sufficiency of the Amish community. The Hasidim of today might just rise to that same standard of uniqueness and self-sufficiency.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fight-over-religious-education
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A cautious revival of streaming
Nico’s prospects were already looking dicey in the second grade. Raised by his Latina grandmother in a Spanish-speaking home, he was a witty boy whose clowning got him branded as a troublemaker in an Arizona public school outside Phoenix.
But Nico was saved from this downward spiral by an unlikely intervention —a test given to all third graders. Scoring in the 97th percentile, Nico was placed with other gifted kids and challenged academically like never before, providing him desperately needed focus. By fifth grade in 2021, according to Karen Brown, director of gifted services at Paradise Valley Unified School District, the class clown had become a class leader and was elected to the Student Council.
The boy’s turnaround wasn’t a fluke at Paradise Valley. It’s one of a small number of districts nationwide using an innovative approach to organizing classrooms. Elementary students are placed in six different groups based on ability and then are carefully mixed together in classrooms in ways that shrink the huge achievement gaps among them that make teaching so hard.
This orchestration of students allows teachers to tailor instruction so all students are challenged and can advance more quickly. And they typically do.
The model, called schoolwide cluster grouping, is a counterpoint to today’s prevalent ideology on education pushed by social justice advocates. They oppose most forms of ability grouping, from gifted programs to selective schools, arguing that all students should learn together, no matter their wide range of abilities. The mashed-up classroom in their view is the best way to ensure an equal education and avoid locking black and Latino kids into low performing ability tracks, a widespread practice only a few decades ago.
But many teachers say the result of this approach – classrooms where five grade levels of ability or more separate students – makes effective instruction impossible. They liken it to emergency room triage. Higher performing students are typically shortchanged, as teachers trust them to fend for themselves. The upshot is if the students are getting an equal education, it’s often an equally poor one.
Last year, New York City officials bowed to pressure from advocates and ended selective admissions to most of the city’s middle schools. Earlier, Seattle dropped its gifted program of accelerated instruction.
“There’s a backlash. Districts are seeing a problem with underrepresentation in their gifted programs and say, ‘Let’s just get rid of them,’ and that’s a problem,” says Matt Fugate, an academic expert in gifted education who consults with districts. “They should be saying, ‘How do we make the programs more equitable?’”
Paradise Valley and some other districts have done just that. At Paradise Valley, Brown says, test scores have gone up for students in all ability groups since it adopted the model.
What’s more, in a district that’s about one-third Latino, a much larger percentage of kids like Nico are being identified as gifted, which can dramatically improve the trajectory of their education.
“It works because teachers can truly target instruction after we provide that narrowed range in classrooms,” Brown says. “The model plays a key role in allowing us to address the learning of all students.”
The model has taken root in states such as Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, South Carolina, and Texas, where progressive educators have less influence and where gifted programs get more support.
The Vail School District near Tucson began the program in 2018, and after fifth graders showed improved performance on a cognitive abilities test, officials are expanding it to three more elementary schools, says Christine In-Albon, the director of gifted and advanced learning.
The Trotwood-Madison district in Ohio is aiming for the same kind of academic growth when it debuts the ability grouping program in kindergarten through third grade this fall.
Customized Instruction
The model was first developed by the late Purdue University Professor Marcia Gentry, a prominent scholar on gifted education. She traced the idea back to her own experience of boredom in an easy Michigan high school where she was the valedictorian. Later, as a middle school teacher, she created a gifted program for students who wanted to be challenged.
Then, in pursuing her Ph.D., she developed the hypothesis that all students, not just the gifted, would benefit academically if they were put in ability groups so teachers could customize instruction for them.
Gentry called the model “total school cluster grouping” and tested it. Her 1999 study compared two low-income elementary schools over three years in Michigan. In the school that grouped all students by ability, “a significant increase in achievement test scores … was found” when compared to students in the control school, Gentry and her co-author wrote.
Paradise Valley in 2006 was one of the first districts in the country to adopt the model, albeit a slightly modified version. Dina Brulles, who developed and ran the program at Paradise Valley until last year, is the gifted program coordinator at Arizona State University.
Here’s how it works: Elementary students are evaluated each year for placement in one of six ability groups: Gifted, above average, average, low average, low, and special needs.
Next, classrooms are pieced together, often with students from three groups to reduce their vast achievement gaps. So gifted kids and low performers are not put together. A typical set up: above average, low average and low.
Motivating students is a guiding principle of classroom design: Gifted and above average students are never mixed in classrooms to allow the latter to shine instead of being overshadowed by the brightest minds. The diligent above-average students emerge as role models for lower achievers, a position for which some gifted kids are not well suited.
These mixed classrooms also seek to avoid the stigmatization that arose when schools placed students into easy-to-identify high, medium, and low tracked-classrooms in the 1980s and later. At Paradise Valley, students are not told which ability group they belong to, although some likely figure it out.
Scores Rise at Paradise Valley
The program appealed to Paradise Valley because it’s a cost saver: Districts can address the academic needs of gifted kids, which Arizona and some other states require, without creating a costly stand-alone program and hiring new teachers. Instead, gifted students remain within the regular pool of students as one of six ability groups.
Before beginning the program, Paradise Valley was in a bit of a funk. Many elementary students weren’t achieving the academic growth sought by the district. Gifted students in particular were unchallenged and disengaged in class and barely grew over the school year.
A small group of Paradise Valley principals, eager to try something new, raised their hands to be the first to test the program at their schools. After only a year, they were thrilled to see that test scores in reading and math rose across the board. That prompted the rest of the district’s 30 elementary schools to quickly sign up, Brown, the gifted director, says. Test scores rose in these schools too.
The district wants every student to master a year’s worth of material before moving to the next grade. Now, about 75% of students on average get there, an increase that coincides with schoolwide cluster grouping. “We don’t always see this growth with every student, and when we see a year where we dipped, we go back and fix that,” Brown says.
Paradise Valley also measures itself against other Phoenix area districts with similar student demographics: half white, a third Latino and a third low income. Its passing rates on a 2022 state test, for instance, topped neighboring Peoria Unified by a wide margin: 56% vs. 42% in English, and 48% vs. 36% in math.
Latino students are a significant part of Paradise Valley’s progress. Amid criticism that gifted programs nationwide enroll too few kids from low-income families, the district revamped the way it finds these students as part of its switch to the grouping model.
In the past, the district relied on parents to nominate their kids for testing, which meant the pool was mostly white and Asian. Now teachers are trained to spot behaviors associated with gifted students – they can be impatient with repetitive instruction, dismissive with a roll of their eyes, and intensely perfectionistic – and more Latinos are now being evaluated.
The district also decided to bear the costs of testing all students in one grade each year to find gifted kids who otherwise go unnoticed.
At 23 of Paradise Valley’s 30 elementary schools, there is now equal representation: The percentage of Latinos in gifted clusters mirrors the schools’ overall demographics – a feat that’s hard for most schools to match. Four other schools are closing in on that mark and the remaining three are making progress, Brown says.
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Australia: Shock stats: Rate of high school dropouts reaches 10-year high
Students deserting useless education/indoctrination
The number of Queensland students finishing year 12 has drastically dropped in the past three years, with current rates now below those seen a decade ago.
Experts believe the disruption of the Covid pandemic played a big role in questioning the focus on academic results and a shift towards finding a career earlier.
The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics schools data shows just 82.2 per cent of year 12 students in 2022 – who would have begun high school in year 7 in 2017 - made it to their final year of schooling.
In 2012, 83.7 per cent of the year 12 cohort who commenced year 8 in 2008 – the beginning of high school at that time – made it to their senior year.
That equates to 11,180 fewer students finishing their secondary schooling now compared to a decade ago, with most of those dropping out male.
The height of high school retention peaked in 2019 just before Covid when 91.3 per cent of students remained until year 12.
University of Southern Queensland senior education lecturer Dr Tania Leach said the pandemic likely played a part in retention rates falling away after some improvement.
“It created the notion that they (students) don’t know what is coming, so they may have decided to look at what they loved in that moment as a potential career,” she said.
Dr Leach said the value of vocational education needed to be increased.
“What we have seen in this data is students choosing different pathways,” she said. “At the moment, it could be that our education system is one-size-fits-all due to such a focus on academic and ATAR results. We need a balance and range; one career pathway should not be privileged over another.”
Tertiary offers to school-leavers show a small shift away from the traditional university path. Queensland’s Class of 2012 received about 49,500 QTAC offers during the two major rounds, but Class of 2022 graduates got only about 45,117.
Construction Skills Queensland chief executive Brett Schimming said in the face of a 10-year high work demand in the state, his organisation changed tack in 2019.
“Today’s young people are the Instagram generation … we started to turn the conversation around and invest in new ways of talking about the industry,” he said.
“We now use virtual reality to demonstrate what it is like on a construction site … put the goggles on and you’re driving a high-tower crane, or on the ground as a carpenter.”
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1 May, 20233
New Book: Mediocrity Has Long Plagued Government-Run Schools
The American public school system has been defined by mediocrity for over four decades, argues a new book by two of America’s leading education reformers.
In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools are Failing Today’s Students, co-authors Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis explore how government schools evolved to embrace mediocre standards–an ailment that long preceded the COVID-19 pandemic.
Boyack, founder of the Libertas Institute and prolific author, joins forces with another powerhouse, DeAngelis, school choice evangelist and American Federation for Children Senior Fellow, to highlight 40 concrete examples of government schools failing students in the present day.
The book’s release coincides with the 40th anniversary of a 1983 report entitled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. Then-Reagan Education Secretary Terrel H. Bell oversaw the project.
Four decades ago, the report warned about “the rising tide of mediocrity” befalling America’s education foundations:
"Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur-- others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments."
The writers attribute the origins of this malaise to progressive figures Horace Mann and John Dewey—two individuals behind today’s corrupted model of public schooling.
The authors attribute “the schematics of today’s government schools” to Horace Mann’s reverence for the 19th century Prussian model of education. This model, they write, consisted of the following aspects: standardized curriculum, testing, compulsory education, professionalization of teachers, and career training.
“It was an authoritarian, top-down model that emphasized the collective over the individual,” Boyack and DeAngelis explain of Mann’s emulation of a “factory model school.”
The indoctrination, they continue, materialized under secular humanist John Dewey. Dewey wrote in his book, My Pedagogic Creed, how the “true kingdom of god” is the government. The authors also noted how he and other so-called reformers wanted to “build up forces…whose natural effect is to undermine the importance and uniqueness of family life.”
Notice the parallels to today’s leading government school advocates and their concerted effort to divorce parents from their children? It’s not a coincidence; these progressive reformers intended for this to happen.
From that time period to today, the quality of education has, sadly, diminished thanks, in part, to powerful teachers unions that put themselves before their students.
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president and darling of the Left, first comes to mind. She colluded with the federal government - namely the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) - to keep schools closed despite evidence later showing schools were safe to attend.
Earlier this week, Weingarten went before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Subcommittee on Education denying her culpability in the matter, but House Republicans didn’t let her off the hook. A FOIA request from Americans for Public Trust revealed the powerful union head helped craft the 2021 CDC school reopening guidance to keep the majority of schools closed.
The New York Post reported, “Powerful AFT boss Randi Weingarten spoke twice by phone with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in the week leading up to the Feb. 12, 2021, announcement that halted full re-opening of in-person classes — including the day before the guidance was released…”
She and her union buddies deserve to be reprimanded for causing immeasurable learning loss on the whole of students, the authors argue.
It’s no wonder the “Fund Students, Not Systems” movement – a grassroots effort both have helped popularize on and off social media– is gaining steam across the U.S. today. But the authors go beyond school choice. That’s just a starting point.
While the book emphasizes 40 inherent problems with today’s schooling system, they advocate for the following “education entrepreneurship” alternatives for parents to public schooling: private schools, microschools, homeschool co-ops, online learning, tutoring, and cloud-based classrooms.
Instead of looking to self-appointed experts who tweet endlessly that reforms like school choice are useless against woke education, parents and reformers should seek out the likes of Boyack and DeAngelis who not only point out problems but are actively working to change the educational system for the better.
Education reformers like the two co-authors should give Americans hope that not all is lost.
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School Allows Reading of LGBT Book to Second Graders Despite State Law Requiring Parental Consent
A Missouri elementary school allowed a parent to read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without first informing other parents, although state law requires school districts to notify parents beforehand about lessons on sexuality.
Webster Groves School District, located in the suburbs of St. Louis, allowed the parent to read “I Am Jazz” to the second graders in September as part of Clark Elementary School’s “Mystery Reader” program, where a family member surprises a child by reading to the class.
A student’s parent asked for permission to read the book, and the school approved the request. But the school chose not to inform the parents of other students, a parent activist told The Daily Signal, although Missouri law requires schools to inform parents of any classroom content on human sexuality.
School districts must notify parents of the “basic content of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction to be provided to the student” and a “parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction,” the 2018 law states.
Because other parents didn’t know about the classroom reading of “I Am Jazz,” they couldn’t opt their 7-year-olds out of learning about transgenderism at school.
The district’s superintendent, John Simpson, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the incident.
“I Am Jazz” is the story of transgender-identifying biological male Jazz Jennings. It is rated as age-appropriate for children aged 4 and up. The book says that from the age of 2, Jazz liked the color pink, dressing up as a mermaid, and wearing girls’ clothes.
“I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called transgender,” the book, told from Jazz’s perspective, reads. “I was born this way!”
The parent activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his children from bullying at school, said he was not surprised by the “I Am Jazz” incident.
“The culture among admin and staff is to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion at any cost,” he told The Daily Signal. “They cannot see the possible downside of educating children on topics of sexual and gender ideology at such a young age.”
Derek Duncan, communications director for the Webster Groves School District, said the district doesn’t believe it broke the law with the classroom reading of “I Am Jazz.”
“While we don’t believe this violates the law, we are aware of this situation and have appropriately addressed it,” Duncan told The Daily Signal in an email.
Duncan did not elaborate when asked.
The Webster Groves district, with 10 schools and more than 4,400 students, has a history of pushing radical gender ideology on children. Also in September, a high school librarian encouraged students to check out sexually explicit books from her list of commonly banned books and enter a raffle for a “sweet prize.”
The school district also plans to include the personal pronouns “they/them” in math problems and hire certified teachers as “math interventionists” to fight racism and gender bias in math classes, following a curriculum evaluation.
One family was upset when their second grader came from school saying she had learned that boy bodies can have girl brains and vice versa. After the family expressed concerns, the teacher included two brief sentences about the classroom reading of “I Am Jazz” in a longer email to parents.
“Last week we read the book I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings and illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas,” reads a copy of the email obtained by The Daily Signal. “In the book, Jazz shares her transgender experience.”
Although Missouri law doesn’t mandate sex education in public schools, the Webster Groves School District begins teaching children about gender identity early in elementary school.
First graders learn about gender expression through the children’s book “My Princess Boy,” according to a copy of the curriculum obtained by The Daily Signal. The parent activist said the district makes its sex education curriculum available upon request.
Told from a mom’s perspective, “My Princess Boy” is the story of a little boy who loves “pink and sparkly things” and “sometimes wears dresses” and “his princess tiara.”
“And a Princess Boy can wear pink and I will tell him how pretty he looks,” the boy’s mother says.
“If you see a Princess Boy … Will you laugh at him? Will you call him a name? Will you play with him? Will you like him for who he is?” the children’s book asks young readers.
Webster Groves fifth graders learn about gender identity and expression. They play a “guess the gender” game based on the behavior of pretend children.
“Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves in relation to being male or female or a combination,” the curriculum for 10-year-olds says. “It comes from a person’s own inner thoughts and feelings. It may or may not match the way others see them.”
Sixth graders learn about gender with a graphic depicting the “gender bread” person, which defines transgender as “a person who does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.” The “gender bread” graphic also defines “assigned male,” “assigned female,” and “nonbinary.”
The “gender bread” graphic defines “gender fluid” as “someone with a non-fixed gender identity [who] can switch back and forth.”
Teachers tell seventh graders that “gender exists on a spectrum” and instruct them not to “make assumptions about gender,” to “use preferred names and pronouns,” and “be a friend or ally.”
“Gender identity has to do with the way you feel about yourself,” reads a different cartoon shown to seventh graders in Webster Groves schools. “Sexual orientation is based on the way you feel toward others.”
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Australia: High school pass marks lowered to under 50 per cent
Struggling Year 12 students who fail exams and assignments are still passing maths and English subjects, as state curriculum bodies push down pass marks to below 50 per cent.
In results that raise questions about teaching and syllabus standards, fresh “grade boundary” data from the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) shows that Year 12 students scored a “C” pass-mark in specialist maths with an overall mark of 47 out of 100 last year.
In maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths.
In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100.
And Victoria’s “score ranges’’ for coursework units and written exams for each subject in 2021 reveal students could pass some of the final Year 12 science, maths and English exams despite getting two out of three questions wrong.
Teacher shortages are being blamed for the poor results, as schools struggle to find enough teachers with university qualifications in the hard-to-staff maths and science subjects.
Up to 40 per cent of Australian maths students are being taught by teachers who did not specialise in the subject during their four-year education degree at university.
Senior maths and science academics and teachers warned yesterday that too many students are leaving Year 12 without the necessary maths skills, blaming both teaching standards and the curriculum.
Professor Jennifer Stow, an eminent researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute of Molecular Bioscience, said she was “hugely concerned’’ about falling standards among high school maths graduates and criticised “what is being taught and how it’s being taught’’.
“I think students aren’t being taught enough basics in maths to give them a good underpinning to build upon at a higher education level,’’ she said. “Assignments don’t teach them formulae or maths rules or how to do calculations – they are being assessed on assignments that anyone can mark. They should be drilled on maths rules and formulae, and shown the way to do things.’’
Maths teacher Dr Stephen Norton, who spent 15 years teaching mathematics to trainee teachers at Griffith University before returning to the classroom this year, said many students were finishing primary school without knowing their times tables, long division and multiplication, or fractions. “When they get to high school they’re cactus,’’ he said.
“The biggest problem in secondary school is you get a whole bunch of kids coming to school in Grade 7 with the knowledge of Grade 4 or 5.
Education Minister Jason Clare says children and students aren’t as ready for school or university as they used to…
“For some of them, if you ask, ‘What’s seven multiplied by six?’ they can’t do it.
“They don’t know how to multiply, they haven’t been taught long division and they can’t add or multiply fractions.’’
Dr Norton said high school teachers were required to teach to a detailed curriculum so quickly that they did not have time to help students catch up on basic concepts.
“If you’ve got a struggling kid, or a kid who hasn’t quite got it, they will fall behind quite quickly,’’ he said.
Dr Norton said the best way to improve students’ maths results would be to ensure primary school teachers are given more training to teach the subject. “The primary school teachers are so poorly prepared by universities,’’ he said.
Queensland is the only state to publish subject-level grade boundaries, which show that in maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark for Year 12 last year was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths. In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100. In biology, the lowest pass mark for a C grade was 48, while in chemistry it was 50, and 44 in modern history.
In Victoria in 2021, the pass mark for the final written exam in biology was 108 out of a possible 240 marks – an effective pass mark of 45 per cent.
In chemistry, the lowest score for a C mark was 78 out of 240 – a pass mark of 32 per cent.
Maths methods had a pass score of 50 out of 160 in the mathematical methods exam, revealing that students answered just one in three questions correctly.
In specialist maths, the pass rate for the written exam was 35 out of 80 marks, meaning students could pass despite failing 56 per cent of the questions.
In the English exam, the lowest score was 26 out of 60 marks – a 40 per cent pass rate.
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority did not respond to The Australian’s requests for comment.
A QCAA spokesman said that a grade of C “matches the objectives of the course and is considered ‘satisfactory’.’’
“Every year we look at the achievement of students to determine the grade boundaries,’’ he said. “This involves the QCAA and expert teachers looking at student performance across their range of assessments in every subject to determine cut-offs that align to each reporting standard on a 100-point scale.
“If the range for a C in a subject is 45-64 marks, it is because the student work that received marks in this range demonstrated the attributes of a C standard as described in the syllabus.
Dr Kevin Donnelly, a senior English teacher, curriculum writer and academic who reviewed the national curriculum in 2014, said Australia set a “low bar’’ for education. “We’ve lowered the bar to create a false picture of how well our students are doing and it breeds complacency,’’ he said.
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