I will admit to having mocked some of the pro-Palestinian protesters as not being willing to pick up a rifle and go fight for that in which they believe, but I realize that most of them have to finish up their papers for their Diversity, equity, and inclusion classes, or cover their shifts at Starbucks. Those lattés don’t make themselves, you know. But Russell Rickford seems to have plenty of free time on his hands now! Continue reading
Category Archives: Education
Your #FreedomOfSpeech doesn’t include requiring other people to pay for it
It’s an old, old saw: the freedom of speech does not protect you if you yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Simply put, the freedom of speech does not protect anyone from the consequences of their speech.
The Biden Administration certainly agreed with that, hating the idea that the riff-raff could challenge the Accepted Wisdom — which means: the government’s position — on the COVID-19 vaccines:
Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform.
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation. Continue reading
Regardless of what the #woke want to believe, the numbers don’t lie
At some point, you’d think that even the wokest of the #woke[1]From Wikipedia:
Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading would understand the facts. The tweet screencaptured on the right gives you the basics, and you can read the whole story here. From the Portland Press-Herald:
Transgender girl makes history with victory at cross country regional
Soren Stark-Chessa, a sophomore at Maine Coast Waldorf School, controlled the Class C South girls’ race from start to finish, with support from the crowd.
by Steve Craig, Staff Writer | Saturday, October 21, 2023
CUMBERLAND — A 15-year-old runner on Saturday became the first transgender athlete to win a regional high school cross country championship in Maine.
Soren Stark-Chessa, a sophomore at Maine Coast Waldorf School in Freeport, won the Class C South girls’ title at Twin Brook Recreation Area, completing the 3.1-mile course in 19 minutes, 17.78 seconds – a minute and 22 seconds faster than the runner-up.
“I think I came out a little strong but just kept pushing through it and I’m happy with it,” Stark-Chessa said of her race.
As you can see, the Press-Herald apparently follows a stylebook which specifies the pronouns favored by the person to whom they refer, even if those pronouns are an abject lie.
The numbers don’t lie: 1:22 faster than the first real girl running is a huge gap, 7.13%. While young Mr Stark-Chessa beat the runner-up by 82.51 seconds, the gap between second and third place, both real girls, was just 18.82 seconds. Continue reading
References
| ↑1 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
|---|
This is how Hitler got good Europeans to load Jews into cattle cars!
If anyone still wonders how the Nazis were able to get millions of good, mostly nominally Christian, Europeans to round up and herd the Jews into railcars, to be shipped off to an unknown but obviously dire fate, just watch this video, and your eyes will be opened. Continue reading
I love it when a plan comes together . . . and when someone else’s plans fall apart! When people tell you who they are, believe them!
Perhaps my good friend Christine Flowers didn’t get to cancel these people herself, but it does show that while we all have our freedom of speech, other people have a freedom to listen, and some people might not like what you have to say!
Harvard students scramble to take back support for letter attacking Israel as some CEOs look to blacklist them
By Melissa Koenig | Wednesday, October 11, 2023 | 2:34 PM EDT
A flurry of Harvard University students and groups are desperately trying to backtrack on their support of a letter blaming Israel for the mass slaughter of its own people by Hamas terrorists — as some business titans seek to blacklist them from future jobs. Continue reading
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Editorial Board know better than you MAGAts and deplorables how to rear your children! Just sit down and shut up, you MAGA extremists!
Hillary Clinton said the quiet point out loud, saying “At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the (MAGA) cult members.” I’m pretty sure that the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who are very, very upset that some parents do not want their children exposed to groomer material, agree!
Book bans have no place in a free society | Editorial
Pennsylvania ranks among the top states for book bans in schools. Legislators in Harrisburg must take a stand against censorship.
by The Editorial Board | Saturday, October 7, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel about a firefighter who burns down houses that own books. The 1953 novel, which some have tried to ban over the years, is set in an unnamed city in the distant future.
In many ways, that disturbing future doesn’t feel too far removed from what’s happening right now.
By one count, there were more than 3,300 instances of banned books in public schools across the country during the last academic year — a 33% increase compared with 2021-22. Efforts to challenge and take books off the shelves have overtaken school boards and local libraries nationwide, dividing towns and pitting neighbor against neighbor.
The Philadelphia suburbs are ground zero for many of the book bans in Pennsylvania, which ranks among the top states for book bans in schools. It is a shameful distinction for a state founded by William Penn as a haven for religious freedom for fellow Quakers.
You know, I agree with the article headline: “Book bans have no place in a free society.” But what the Editorial Board have missed is that, when it comes to the public schools, we are not talking about a free society! Pennsylvania, like every other state, has a compulsory education law, requiring that youngsters between certain ages attend school! While parents do have the option of sending their kids to a private school or to homeschool them — if they follow government regulations — they are also required to pay property taxes to support the public schools anyway. Continue reading
The failure of big city public schools There'd be no demand for private schools if the public schools were doing their jobs!
We have previously mentioned, many times, how Helen Gym Flaherty and Kendra Brooks sold their souls to the public school teachers’ unions, touting how the Edward Steel Elementary School was kept public and didn’t “go charter.” Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math.
There’s always some outrage on Twitter — sorry, Elon Musk, but I still don’t call it “X” — when yet another public school teacher tries pushing homosexual or transgender nonsense on their students, but the real problem is that the public schools just aren’t doing a very good job in actually educating students.
Middle School Teacher Admits That His Students Are Performing On A ‘Fourth-Grade Level’ And No One Is Doing Anything About It
“I could probably count on one hand how many kids are actually performing on their grade level.”
By Nia Tipton | Friday, September 22, 2023
A middle school teacher voiced his frustrations with the public school system after admitting that most of the students in his class are severely underperforming. In a TikTok video, a content creator named Quis, who works as a public school educator, sparked a conversation around a problem that many students around the country seem to having.
“We all know the world is behind because of the pandemic, but I don’t understand why they’re not stressing to you how bad it is,” Quis began in his video. He explained that as a seventh-grade teacher, he’s noticed that most of the children in his class are performing at a fourth-grade level.
He continued, saying that almost no one, the other public school administrators or even the parents of these kids are not speaking about it or doing anything to help. Instead, these students are still being passed on to the next grade despite severely underperforming.
The panicked response to COVID-19 was one thing, but, with a few notable exceptions in places like Philadelphia, there was really only one school year of ‘remote’ education; the panicdemic — and yes, that’s how I spell it, because that’s exactly what it was — might reasonably be blamed to students being one grade behind, but three? 2020 was three years ago; if the blame is on the virus, then “Quis” is telling us that his students have had no education at all since the panic began! Continue reading
Are the teachers’ unions writing purportedly straight news pieces for The Washington Post?
The Washington Post got the headline wrong. The editors make it sound as though the students were the ones in the wrong for reporting a teacher who broke the law!
Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?
Mary Wood’s school reprimanded her for teaching a book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Now she hopes her bond with students can survive South Carolina’s politics.
by Hannah Natanson | Monday, September 18, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT
CHAPIN, S.C. — As gold sunlight filtered into her kitchen, English teacher Mary Wood shouldered a worn leather bag packed with first-day-of-school items: Three lesson-planning notebooks. Two peanut butter granola bars. An extra pair of socks, just in case.
Everything was ready, but Wood didn’t leave. For the first time since she started teaching 14 years ago, she was scared to go back to school.
Six months earlier, two of Wood’s Advanced Placement English Language and Composition students had reported her to the school board for teaching about race. Wood had assigned her all-White class readings from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America.
The students wrote in emails that the book — and accompanying videos that Wood, 47, played about systemic racism — made them ashamed to be White, violating a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” on account of their race.
The story was originally entitled “South Carolina students reported their teacher’s lesson on Ta-Nehisa Coates,” or so I judge from the blurb that appears on the article tab using Microsoft Edge. Someone changed it to the headline you see above, which includes “Can she trust them again?” But what Mrs Satterwhite[1]While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married … Continue reading did was in blatant defiance of the law in the Palmetto State. Do the editors of the Post support teachers breaking the law?
Reading Coates’s book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people,” one student wrote.
Let’s be clear here: Mr Coates, who has had material published previously in the Post, something the Post article does not mention, which is a violation of standard journalistic ethics, strongly concentrates on race relations in the United States. Wikipedia’s section on Mr Coates’ views on race in the US states:
In an interview with Ezra Klein, Coates outlined his analysis that the extent of white identity expression in the United States serves as a critical factor in threat perceptions of certain European Americans and their response to political paradigm shifts related to African Americans, such as the presidency of Barack Obama.
I note here that Ezra Klein was the creator of JournoList, so the above statement concerned a left-wing “journalist” reporting about a left-wing subject. While I was obviously not present during Mrs Satterwhite’s lessons, I don’t find the student’s complaint that the book felt like “reading hate propaganda towards white people” to be improbable.
At least two parents complained, too. Within days, school administrators ordered Wood to stop teaching the lesson. They placed a formal letter of reprimand in her file. It instructed her to keep teaching “without discussing this issue with your students.”
Wood finished out the spring semester feeling defeated and betrayed — not only by her students, but by the school system that raised her. The high school Wood teaches at is the same one she attended.
Oh, she felt “defeated and betrayed” because students reported her to teaching a lesson which broke the law? People might genuinely disagree about the merits of the law in question, but it is still the law.
Here is the crux of the teacher’s problem:
Wood believes trust is fundamental to the classroom. She has to trust her students. They and their parents have to trust her. But trust, she believes, is impossible without authenticity. And for Wood, teaching authentically means assigning writers like Coates — voices unfamiliar, even disconcerting, to students in her lakeside town. Because of what happened last year, though, Wood now worried anything, from the most provocative essay to the least interesting comment about her weekend, might be resisted, recorded and reported by the children she was supposed to be teaching.
And if she couldn’t trust them, how was she supposed to make them trust her?
That trust was broken when Mrs Satterwhite began teaching her students something prohibited by law, yet she somehow sees the trust as having been broken by the students reporting her, not her teaching of a prohibited lesson. If the lessons she taught made some students feel “ashamed to be white,” how does that not violate “a South Carolina proviso that forbids teachers from making students ‘feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress’ on account of their race”?
Mrs Satterwhite was not discharged. She had a letter of reprimand placed in her file, and was admonished not to teach inappropriate lessons. Yet she has returned to the classroom this school year.
How can she trust her students? She can record her lessons herself, to prove that she has remained within the state’s and the school board’s guidelines.
And Wood believed the school district had come to accept her — respecting her students’ 80-plus percent AP exam passage rates year after year, above the national average — even if not everyone liked her methods. Chapin was her hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.
No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.
The Post reporter tried to put that innocuously, but the meaning is clear: Mrs Satterwhite is not just “a self-professed liberal,” but she was choosing to teach that liberalism to the students in a mostly conservative area. Lexington County, in which Chapin is located, gave 92,817 votes, 64.20% of the total, to President Trump in 2020, versus 49,301 votes, 34.10%, to the dummkopf from Delaware.
But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch — conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.
Though the Post didn’t want to say it directly, the above paragraph tells us all that we need to know: Mrs Satterwhite was bringing her politics into the classroom.
As one would expect, Mrs Satterwhite attempted to use an “I know better because I am a professional” argument, the type of thing the liberal teachers’ unions try, but it didn’t work: parents have, and should have, the ultimate authority over what their children are taught.
The Post article is a very long one, and it is a left-leaning editorial, slanted to make Mrs Satterwhite a martyr, attempting to masquerade as a news piece.
References
| ↑1 | While the teacher did not respect her husband, Ryan Satterwhite, enough to have taken his last name, The First Street Journal does not show similar disrespect to him, and always refers to married women by their proper names, though we do not change the direct quotes of others. |
|---|
Kendra Brooks just can’t handle the truth!
We reported yesterday evening on Philadelphia City Councilwoman Kendra Brooks and her posturing in front of Edward T Steel Elementary School. It was noted that Steel Elementary, which both defeated mayoral candidate Helen Gym Flaherty and she touted as a victory for public schools, as Mrs Flaherty fought successfully to keep from being privatized, but Steel Elementary is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, in which 8% of students tested grade-level proficient in reading, and a whopping 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for math. Perhaps, we suggested, keeping Steel Elementary public rather than charter wasn’t that great a move. After all, it’s difficult to imagine that students could perform much worse than they already have!
It would be, of course, unfair to write an article on Miss Brooks and not let her know that I had done so, so I tweeted a reply to her. I do not know if Miss Brooks read the linked article, but, as of 8:18 AM EDT, Twitter analytics indicates that there were three clicks on the link, along with three profile visits generated by my reply.
Well, I got my reply from the Councilwoman, in a manner that doesn’t really surprise me. 🙂
So funny! Miss Brooks is a member of the Philadelphia City Council, which makes her a person of some political power, and one would think that information on the public school she touted ought to be important to her. But, rather than worrying about Steel Elementary’s, a school she said her daughter attended, poor performance, Miss Brooks chose instead to stick her head in the sand. Political posturing trumps actually doing something to help.
I attended the public schools. When I was in Mt Sterling High School, 1967 to 1971, we had exactly one teacher who had his master’s; all of the others topped out with baccalaureate degrees. A 1937 WPA/CCC building, we had no air conditioning, the teachers had no union, the building was heated by radiators via a boiler in the basement, there had been no cafeteria until the Elementary School across the street was built in 1961, there was no school bus service, and this was well before personal computers and that internet thingy Al Gore invented. Yet somehow, some way, everyone who was graduated could actually read his diploma. We had no metal detectors or security guards, and boys traded pocketknives and argued whether K-Bar or Buck made better blades, on the school’s right front portico, at the top of the tall steps. Oddly enough, no one was stabbed, nor was anyone worried about it. If there was a fight in the parking lot, as happened at least a few times, it was two guys, with a circle of spectators cheering on one or the other, and the odds were good that at least one, if not both of them, had knives in their pockets, but the knives never came out.
Of course, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Mrs Flaherty for Mayor, which supports Miss Brooks, would be absolutely aghast at all of that. Why, they’d sputter, teachers have to get their master’s degrees within just a few years, but it has to be asked: why, if advanced degrees are so necessary, did a small-town school in the South do a better job in actually educating its students when every teacher but one had only a bachelor’s degree?
Is it possible, just possible, that everything that the teachers’ unions have been pushing is exactly the wrong thing?
That, of course, is the kind of question that Working Families Party politicians like Kendra Brooks does not want asked, and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers most certainly don’t want answered. They just can’t handle the truth!