Tag Archives: #Education

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Common sense and lawfare tend to be two diametrically opposed things.

I used to think that political liberalism encompassed some divergence of views. After all, they can’t all think exactly the same on everything, right? But the more I read the more I see a mental monolith, and it’s a monolith that verges on stupidity.

The Trump administration is investigating Smith College for admitting trans women. Could Bryn Mawr be next?

Bryn Mawr College, like Smith, accepts all individuals who identify as women. The Trump administration says that violates federal discrimination laws, but has not yet gone after Bryn Mawr.

by Susan Snyder | Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo 2026 | 4:52 PM EDT

President Donald Trump’s administration this week opened an investigation into Smith College, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the country, for admitting transgender women.

Both Bryn Mawr College and Moore College of Art & Design — women’s colleges in the Philadelphia area — also admit trans women, opening up questions about whether they could be among the next targets, though Moore already is weighing whether to go coed.

“The college remains focused on our mission and commitment to academic excellence,” Bryn Mawr said in a statement. “We continue to operate in compliance with all federal laws and regulations.”

Full disclosure: I did some concrete work at Bryn Mawr College, in 2004, though it was between semesters, with few people on campus.

Further down:

The 1,370-student Bryn Mawr on its website notes that it accepts all individuals who identify as women, including cisgender and trans women. The school also accepts “intersex people who do not identify as male, individuals assigned female at birth who have not taken medical or legal steps to identify as male, and individuals assigned female at birth who do not identify within the gender binary.”

Bryn Mawr clarified its enrollment practices regarding transgender women in 2015, noting that the school would accept transgender women and “intersex individuals who live and identify as women at the time of application.”

Does that mean Bryn Mawr would have to retain individuals who identified as women at the time of application, but who later decided that they were really men? 🙂

Personally, I do not see the legal issue, unless there are males who applied and were denied because they are male; such men might have a potential discrimination complaint.

I could see a potential privacy issue, as was the case with Brayden Fleming, the male volleyball player calling himself “Blaire” and pretending to be a woman to play on the San José State women’s volleyball team, and who could “pass” well enough that both his teammates and opposing teams did not know he is male. His road trip roommate didn’t realize that he was male. But if Smith and Bryn Mawr colleges were open, and informed other students that a particular student was actually male, giving the other students the opportunity to decide for themselves whether they wished to share a locker room or restroom with the transgender student, it’s difficult to see a legal problem.

Then again, we know how that would work out: any student who decided that no, she did not want to share a bathroom or locker room with a male student would herself be accused of transphobia, and disciplined, possibly to the extent of expulsion. Any student who protested the inclusion of men males in women’s only spaces would face all sorts of problems in Bryn Mawr, because the far-left leadership have decided, against all rationality and all science that boys really can be girls, and that it’s hateful to dispute that cockamamie notion.

So, the colleges have created their own problems, but had they decided that only real women could be admitted, they’d have faced problems under the previous Administration. Common sense and lawfare tend to be two diametrically opposed things.

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Well, of course they did!

A viral video on TikTok made its way to Twitter as well, one in which a student at Preparatory Charter High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia asked some of his classmates to read a sentence, and several struggled. One of the sentences was, “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche,” an odd bit of wording to be sure, but one which any high school student should be able to get through. “Silhouette” might have fooled some people, the “h” being mostly silent, though providing a clue to pronunciation anyway, and “gauche” is an uncommon word, though I have used it thrice on Twitter. But many were also tripped up by “extraordinary,” a very common word.

The videos were entitled, “Can you read?”, and it was obvious that several of the students actually could not read, at least not at anything close to grade level. So naturally the school had to respond and defend itself. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philly charter school says student’s viral ‘Can You Read?’ video was ‘misleading and unfair’

One video of Preparatory Charter High School students was viewed more than 15 million times on TikTok.

by Maddie Hanna | Sunday, May 3, 2026 |6:27 PM EDT

A South Philadelphia charter school said Sunday that a student’s widely viewed videos showing classmates struggling to read certain words did not accurately reflect the school’s community.

Preparatory Charter High School, which enrolls students in grades 9 through 12, also said it was not seeking to expel the student who made the videos, contrary to posts circulating on social media.

Well, of course the school said that!

The account that posted the video, @whatthevek, did not respond to an interview request Sunday. The account last week also posted a “Can You Read Pt. 2″ video that was viewed more than 2 million times on TikTok, depicting students reading the sentence: “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.”

The footage drew media attention, and widely circulated social media posts claimed that the student who made the videos was facing expulsion.

On Sunday, Prep Charter’s administration said in a statement that while federal privacy rules barred the school from discussing details of disciplinary action, “the student in question is not facing expulsion.”

The school said the video footage “does not accurately reflect our school community or the values we strive to uphold every day.”

“While some students may have agreed to be filmed, the way the footage was presented lacks important context and has led to a portrayal that is misleading and unfair,” the school said in the statement. “The video titled ‘Can You Read?’ does not represent the character, effort, or abilities of our students as a whole.”

It doesn’t? Here’s education reporter Maddie Hanna’s final paragraph:

On Pennsylvania state assessments in the 2024-25 school year, 46.5% of students scored proficient in English language arts, compared with nearly 50% statewide.

That’s actually worse than the US News and World Report rankings, which had students there scoring 56% at grade level proficiency in reading. The trouble is that the Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers had only 21% grade level proficient in mathematics and 18% grade level proficient in science, yet the school has a graduation rate of 95%.

Perhaps someone smarter than me can tell me how that math works out? How does a high school which supposedly focuses on math and science graduate 95% of its students when roughly 80% of its students are not grade level proficient in math and science? What is a diploma from Prep Charter actually worth?

The interesting thing is that the unnamed @whatthevek was making a video on the school’s strongest performing area. What would have happened if he had been asking math of science questions?

He also posted a video entitled, “Are you Smarter than a 5th grader?”

Yes, I’m old, but I’m pretty sure that all of the 78 members of the Mt Sterling High School Class graduating Class of 1971 could actually read. They didn’t all take algebra or trig — I did — but no one would ever think of really asking them if they could read. And we had exactly one teacher who had his Master’s degree. Perhaps there’s something just plain wrong with public education today?

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl! Yet another public school teacher accused of trying to become sexually involved with a student

There was no one more disappointed than I was when The Philadelphia Inquirer and then-Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams started going after the Archdiocese of Philadelphia for covering up sexual abuses by Catholic priests, or the horrible statistics when the John Jay Report, The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002 was released. Priests should be above the sexual abuse, and sometimes outright rape, that was documented.

Alas! it seems that (supposedly) celibate priests have not been the only ones engaging in the sexual abuse of minors. The arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 exposed a whole other world of adult men trying to diddle teenaged girls, and if the left have been trying everything they could to tie it to President Trump — something the Biden Administration could not do when it had possession of the Epstein evidence for four years, despite all of their attempts to disqualify and jail Mr Trump before the 2024 elections — it’s clear that plenty of other miscreants had been enjoying themselves on “Epstein Island.”

Nevertheless, those were the wealthy and powerful, those who thought they could do no wrong. But what we have been seeing more and more these days is not the wealthy and powerful, but ordinary, working-class citizens, heavily tilted towards public school teachers.

KY substitute teacher, assistant coach charged with sexually abusing student

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | March 30, 2026 | 5:50 PM EDT

Bardstown police arrested a Bardstown High School substitute teacher on Monday and charged her with sexually abusing a student, police and school officials said.

Mary “Hanna” Mattingly, 31, was charged with first-degree sexual abuse and procuring or promoting use of a minor by electronic means, police said.

No, of course the Lexington Herald-Leader did not publish Miss Mattingly’s photograph, despite the fact it was available as a public record and has been available online from several other sources. The First Street Journal does publish those mugshots, and I use them whenever I can find them.

Bardstown City Schools’ Superintendent Ryan Clark confirmed Mattingly was also an assistant high school girls’ soccer coach.

Mattingly was listed in that role on the Kentucky High School Athletic Association website for the last two seasons.

Clark said in a statement that an anonymous letter was received Thursday “alleging inappropriate conduct by a female substitute teacher and a Bardstown High School juvenile.“

“Bardstown City Schools immediately initiated an investigation, removed the individual from her job duties, placed her on administrative leave, and alerted the authorities,” the school district’s statement said.

Several stories noted that Miss Mattingly (allegedly) communicated with the student on more than one occasion, a record of persistence. WBRD reported, “It had been going on for several months,” Bardstown Police Detective Eric Williamson said Wednesday. “Social media was the main avenue for the communication.”

But what none of the stories I could find told us whether the student she contacted was male or female. That is a frequent enough occurrence for me to conclude that the credentialed media do not want anyone to infer that homosexuality is in any way connected to sexual abuse, even though the John Jay Report noted that 81% of the victims of sexual abuse by an all-male clergy were boys. We have previously noted how The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to conceal the fact that a teenaged murderer was transgendered, and you’ll find several more such stories on this site.

I take no inference in the specific case of Miss Mattingly, though I’d note from her photo that she’s pretty enough to have attracted plenty of attention from adult men. Bardstown had a Census Bureau estimated population of 14,104 on July 1, 2024, and isn’t a particularly poor place as small towns in the Bluegrass State go.

Miss Mattingly is listed as being 31 years old, and that means she is certainly old enough to have known better than to mess with a student. There have been enough stories in the media concerning adults in general, and adult teachers specifically, going after minor students, that no one with an IQ above room temperature could have been unaware that attempting a sexual relationship with a minor, with a public school student, was tremendously dangerous. And no teacher of any experience could be unaware that students talk; this stuff can’t be kept secret for long.

Miss Mattingly is, of course, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

Color me shocked that The Philadelphia Inquirer published the photo of an accused criminal. Technically, it isn’t a mugshot, so perhaps it’s allowed under a very narror interpretation of the newspaper’s stated mugshot policy. but I couldn’t find the newspaper’s Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — blurb, so I screen captured the image from the article itself. Since the photo caption states it was from a New Jersey state Supreme Court video, there isn’t a copyright issue.

Former South Jersey teacher charged with sexual assault began grooming student when he was 12, prosecutor alleges

Ashley Fisler was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School in Washington Township.

by Melanie Burney | April Fool’s Day, 2026 | 3:33 PM EDT

A former Washington Township middle school teacher began grooming a student for a sexual relationship when he was 12 and abused him for years, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

The allegations against Ashley Fisler, who was charged last week with sexually assaulting a former student at Orchard Valley Middle School, were detailed during a detention hearing to determine whether she should be released pending trial. Superior Court Judge William Ziegler said he would issue a decision Thursday.

Note that Miss Fisler has been charged but not yet convicted. The newspaper stated that “Pre-conviction mugshots are inherently unfair, depicting suspects as criminals before guilt or innocence has been established.”

Fisler, who is no longer working as a teacher, is charged with six counts of sexual assault of a minor and one count each of endangering the welfare of a child and official misconduct of a public servant.

“This was more than just six isolated acts of sex abuse against a minor,” said Kylie Finley, an assistant Gloucester County prosecutor. “This was a pattern of six years of grooming, manipulation, and abuse by this defendant as a middle school teacher against one of her active and former students.”

Miss Fisler, now 36, left the school system in 2023.

Teachers are all college educated, with at least a bachelor’s degree, and are normally pressured to be working toward their master’s as well. They really can’t be unaware of the scandal by Mary Kay Letourneau, and the fact that Mrs Letourneau spent years behind bars for it. Public schools have orientation lessons for all teachers, and inappropriate relationships are surely discussed. The news of Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in 2019 was national news, and Miss Fisler couldn’t have missed it. You just can’t expect this s(tuff) to stay hidden forever.

Well, if the allegations are true, she’s in a heap o’ trouble.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boys! These guys might not do all that well in prison

One would think that, with the hullabaloo over the Epstein files, that educated people, teachers who must have college degrees, would know better than to try to entice minors, but apparently Jordan Cobb, formerly a teacher at the Magoffin County, Kentucky, public schools is actually dumber than a box of rocks.

From the Salyersville Independent:

Former teachers federally indicted

By Heather Oney | Monday, May 5, 2025

PIKEVILLE – Two former Magoffin County Schools teachers were federally indicted and arrested on online enticement charges.

On Thursday, April 24, Jordan Cobb, 32, of Coon Creek Rd, in Salyersville, and Jason W. Back, 42, of Painters Lick Rd, also in Salyersville, were both federal indicted and charged with online enticement and Cobb was charged with an additional cyberstalking charge, according to federal court records. There are sealed indictments in both of their cases that may possibly include more charges, however.

Cobb’s federal indictment accuses him of attempting “to knowingly persuade, induce, entice, or coerce an individual under the age of 18, using a means or facility of interstate commerce, to engage in sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense, namely, Rape in the Third Degree,” in or about April and May 2023. It further states that between June 2 and June 13, 2024, Cobb allegedly, “with the intent to harass or intimidate another person under the age of 18 years old, used an interactive computer service or electronic communication service of interstate commerce, or any other facility of interstate or foreign commerce, to engage in a course of conduct that causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause emotional distress to that person.”

That was almost a year ago, and now Mr Cobb has been convicted and sentenced:

EKY middle school teacher sentenced to 11 years for enticing a former student

By Austin R. Ramsey | Groundhog Day, February 2, 2026 | 4:07 PM EST

A former Magoffin County middle school teacher was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to enticement of a minor.

Jordan Cobb, 32, of Salyersville, pleaded guilty in October to engaging in an inappropriate Snapchat conversation with a former student. He sent a series of sexually explicit messages, offered to provide the minor with marijuana and made plans to meet for sex, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Kentucky.

Under federal guidelines, Mr Cobb must serve at least 9 years and 4 months before becoming eligible for parole.

I will admit it: I missed both of these stories when they were first published, and only spotted them on doing some research after a subsequent story in which Mr Cobb was sentenced in state court, to five years on basically the same charges. Sadly, it’s no additional time for this terrible teacher:

It said under the terms of Thursday’s plea agreement, Cobb agreed to a five-year sentence and will be ineligible for probation. The sentence will run concurrent with federal charges related to the same investigation.

Concurrent, huh? No wonder Mr Cobb agreed to the plea deal; it means no additional time behind bars for him.

So, what about the other pervert?

Former teacher pleads guilty in federal court

By Heather Oney | Friday, January 16, 2026

ASHLAND – A former Magoffin County Schools teacher pleaded guilty to a federal charge of online enticement on Monday.

In federal court on January 12, Jason W. Back, 43, of Salyersville, was rearraigned in the case before District Judge David L. Bunning, changing his plea to “guilty” in exchange for a plea agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office.

According to the plea agreement signed by Back, he admitted to knowingly persuading, inducing, enticing, or coercing an individual under the age of 18 to engage in unlawful sexual activity; he used a means or facility of interstate commerce to do so (i.e. a cell phone and/or online messaging); and that he knew the individual was under the age of 18.

The plea agreement states that from between March 6 through 9, 2023, in Magoffin County, Back persuaded the minor to engage in sexual activity, specifying that he was a high school teacher when he engaged in a text message conversation with a 17-year-old student, sending a series of sexually explicit messages using his iPhone, including messages outline a plan to meet for unprotected sex on March 9, 2023. According to the plea agreement, the prosecution has evidence that shows Back picked up the minor and that the two had sexual intercourse in Back’s car.

The plea agreement also indicated that, through a pattern of messages sent by Back, who was in a position of authority or special trust as a teacher, enticed the minor to engage in sexual intercourse, which would constitute a charge of third-degree rape.

The age of consent in Kentucky is 16, but this was still criminal because Mr Back held a position of authority over the student.

Mr Back is scheduled to be sentenced on Monday, May 4th, but the crime requires a minimum sentence of ten years, and can be up to life in prison.

These guys must be absolutely nuts. Magoffin County is a poor county, with a median household income of just $33,080 in 2024, but public school teachers in that county had a median salary of $42,043, certainly better than most people in that southeastern Kentucky county earned. These two guys aren’t exactly Brad Pitt in the looks department, but one would think that they could have managed to find a decent young lady who was an actual adult.

Instead, now they get to spend a decade behind bars, where life might be . . . unpleasant . . . for them. At the moment, I’m unable to generate much sympathy for them.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, boy!

Adrian Gonzales, mugshot by Uvalde County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office, and is a public record.

No, Adrian Gonzales, pictured to the right, is not your typical criminal. Rather, he was the police officer stationed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde County, Texas, who channeled Scot Peterson, the coward of Broward, and chose not to confront the shooter who killed 19 students and two teachers during the shootings.

Trial begins for former Uvalde officer charged in Robb Elementary shooting response

Adrian Gonzales faces multiple counts of endangerment, abandonment of a child.

By Peter Charalambous, Josh Margolin, Jenny Wagnon Courts, and Jim Scholz | Monday, January 5, 2026 | 5:12 AM EST

Nearly four years after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in a Texas elementary school, a jury is set to decide whether a police officer should be held criminally responsible in connection with one of the worst school shootings in American history.

Jury selection begins Monday in the trial of former Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales, charged with allegedly placing more than two dozen children in “imminent danger” by failing to respond to the crisis as it unfolded.

Perhaps Mr Gonzalves is not in as big a heap o’ trouble as the headline suggests, given that Mr Peterson was acquitted.

Prosecutors allege that Gonzales, one of the first of nearly 400 officers to respond to the rampage, failed to engage the shooter despite knowing his location, having time to respond and being trained to handle active shooters. It ultimately took 77 minutes for law enforcement to mount a counter-assault that would kill the gunman.

Ever since the shooting tore apart Uvalde on May 24, 2022, families of the victims have been seeking accountability and answers. Many have argued their children might have been saved had police confronted the gunman more quickly.

The trial, being staged 200 miles from Uvalde in Corpus Christi, marks an exceedingly rare instance of prosecutors seeking to convict a member of law enforcement for a response to a school shooting.

Prosecutors in June 2024 charged both Gonzales and Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo — the on-site commander on the day of the shooting — with multiple counts of endangerment and abandonment of a child.

I will state for the record that I have never been put in the position of having to charge into a situation with an armed killer. Yeah, we’d all like to think that we’d be brave enough to take action, but until you actually face the bullets, face the gunfire, knowing that there is a chance that you would be killed, you can’t actually know how you would react.

Our entire history is full of men who did bravely charge into the face of gunfire. Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz said of the Marines who fought on Iwo Jima, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue,” and 6,821 Americans died in that battle, along with another 19,217 wounded. Out of 73,000 American troops — and the D-Day landings included British, Canadian, and French troops as well — who hit the beaches in Normandy on D-Day, 2,501 were killed, and more than 5,000 were wounded. These men, trained to run into the fire, their courage doubtlessly bolstered by the courage of the men beside them, did their duty. In our bloodiest war, the War Between the States, somewhere between 620,000 and possibly as high as 850,000 men went bravely toward their deaths, at a time in which the intense military training of American soldiers, sailors, and Marines during World War II was mostly non-existent.

American courage has not been in scarce supply, overall, but it was a scarce quantity at Uvalde. Many of the Americans who hit the beaches were draftees, many of the 58,200 Americans whose lives were wasted in Vietnam, were conscripts[1]Full disclosure: I was draft eligible in 1972, but by then American involvement in Vietnam was ending. With a high lottery number, and the great reduction of American involvement in that waste case … Continue reading, but every law enforcement officer who arrived on the scene in Uvalde was a volunteer, was a man who had personally committed himself to running toward the fire.

They were trained to do just that:

Two months before a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the school district’s then-police chief was required to attend a training about how to respond to an active shooter, which instructed in no uncertain terms that an “officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker.”

When Pete Arredondo, the police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District at the time of the May 2022 shooting, was confronted with precisely the situation his training should have prepared him for, he did the opposite of what the training instructed would have saved lives, according to a newly released trove of documents from the Uvalde school district.

“Time is the number one enemy during active shooter response,” a lesson plan for the training said. “The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract, or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.”

Officers Arredondo and Gonzales were trained to run toward the fire, and did not. Now they are facing charges over their inactions that sad day. There’s some hesitancy on my part to write about men who chose not to do their duty, in a potentially lethal situation, because I have not personally been tested in such a way, and who knows? Perhaps I would have ducked and run for cover had I been there.

But I was not there, and have taken no training or commitment to run toward the fire. These trials may establish just what the actual commitment of those who do so commit really means.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: I was draft eligible in 1972, but by then American involvement in Vietnam was ending. With a high lottery number, and the great reduction of American involvement in that waste case of a war, I was not called, and did not volunteer.
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Arizona leads the nation in the most important educational reform.

We reported, on Friday morning, how public schools in the Pyrite State have been required to treat mentally ill boys who think that they’re girls as real girls, and how such has caused a number of other high schools to forfeit girls’ volleyball games rather than play against ‘transgender’ players.

The Wall Street Journal has now reported how different options to the public schools have opened up in next-door Arizona:

At the Epicenter of School Choice, Arizona Public Schools Battle Existential Crisis

Educators fight back against falling enrollments and rising competition. One idea: mimic restaurant-industry focus on customer service.

by Matt Barnum | Friday, September 26, 2025 | 10:00 AM EDT

PHOENIX—Public school leaders in Arizona recently convened a summit to combat an existential crisis.

Across the state, enrollments at district public schools are falling. Last month, superintendents gathered in Phoenix at the “Traditional Public Schools Messaging Summit” to strategize ways to improve the perception of public education. The goal: woo families and bolster political support.

In an opening brainstorming session, educators shouted out benefits of public schooling. “We welcome all!” said one person. “We represent the community,” added another. There are “comprehensive choices” in public education, chimed in a third.

Well, perhaps that’s just it: as California is ‘welcoming all’, to the point of pretending that girls can be boys and boys can be girls, and thereby harming the rights and privacy of other people — similar problems are cropping up in the once sensible Commonwealth of Virginia — and the liberal governments imposing #woke ideologies and leftover Biden Administration federal policies are making public schools places that aren’t quite as welcoming to normal people.[1]Yes, by “normal people,” I am referring to heterosexuals Only the cost of private schools have kept millions from fleeing to them . . . and Arizona broke that barrier!

Arizona is at the leading edge of a reckoning in public education. Nationwide, declining birthrates and rising competition—from alternatives like charter schools, private education and home schooling—have eroded student bodies at the regular neighborhood schools that generations of Americans attended.  .  .  .  

In 2022, Arizona became the first state to allow any family to use public funding for their child to attend a private school or support home schooling. The move came as public schools across the country faced intense criticism over Covid precautions and practices related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

A surge of similar voucher initiatives followed in Republican-led states. The federal government will soon launch a program to subsidize private education costs, although states will have to opt into it.

I saw this tweet on Wednesday, and “Rebecca” told us a story which few people know, but which is far too common:

People who say this about autism have exclusively dealt with the high functioning autist, who perhaps has a revulsion to wearing socks. When I was first teaching in public school I had a 4th grade autistic student who regularly wet himself, could not speak beyond moans, often hit and bit out of frustration, could not read or write. If you don’t think parents and children deserve a cure for this, you are either a very evil or very deluded person.

She was responding to another silly post on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — with a graphic saying that “autism does not need to be cured”, so not addressing this topic, but the real problem is that the school stuck her with such a ‘student’ in the first place. ‘Mainstreaming’ the seriously and hopelessly disabled may sound so very sympathetic, but it harms the educational progress for the real students. How does the disruptive autistic ‘student’ inhibit the rest of the class? How does having a ‘student’ who regularly urinates in his pants enable the teacher to continue teaching the other kids in the class?

I remember this very clearly! It was the last day of school at St Joseph’s Regional Academy in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, in early June of 2023, where my younger daughter attended the seventh grade. I took the day off, and was speaking with another parent there, who was herself a teacher at the public Pocono West High School, but put her own kids in parochial school. She described the same situation, a ‘mainstreamed’ handicapped student, and described her job as less teaching than just trying manage a chaotic situation due to a frequently disruptive, seriously handicapped ‘student,’ one who could never function on any normal level, regardless of how many resources were invested in him.

I get it: I’m the [insert slang term for the anus here] who’s wholly insensitive to the needs of handicapped children and their families, but at some point it has to be asked: are we allowing public sympathy for people who will have to be cared for — frequently at public expense! — for their entire lives to negatively impact public education for the vast majority of normal students?

Sadly, the Journal article never brought up the subjects I have, but they are subjects with which most school systems of any size have to deal, and subjects which push normal families to want to get their normal kids out of the public school systems.

Nor does the article raise the subject of teachers, almost entirely from the political left, attempting to indoctrinate students politically. Somehow, some way, I managed to go through twelve years of public schools — back in the days of quill pens and inkwells — without ever knowing anything about my teachers’ sexuality or political leanings, but there are tons of stories now on teachers of this century sharing exactly those things.

The Supreme Court had to rule, in the case of Mahmoud v Taylor (2025), that parents could opt their children out of public school lessons they deemed immoral or contrary to their religious beliefs,[2]Technically, the case allowed the petitioners to receive an injunction to require the opt-outs while the merits of the case were adjudicated, but the majority held that the parents were likely to … Continue reading when the Montgomery County, Maryland, School Board ended such a policy to force children as young as kindergarten to be instructed with “LGBTQ+-inclusive texts.” That’s the kind of thing to which normal parents might object, but the Board wanted to wave away such objections away and indoctrinate kids their way, not the parents.

Is it any wonder that trust in the public schools is low?

The rest of the referenced article I do encourage you to read, but it’s mostly a documentation of sales programs that private and now some public schools are trying to use.

It’s a good thing that Arizona passed their laws concerning school choice, so that their citizens can use it and show the rest of the United States how our education system can work for the good of the American people rather than just the teachers’ unions and liberal special interests. I can just imagine how The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers would react to such a program in the Keystone State!

References

References
↑1 Yes, by “normal people,” I am referring to heterosexuals
↑2 Technically, the case allowed the petitioners to receive an injunction to require the opt-outs while the merits of the case were adjudicated, but the majority held that the parents were likely to succeed on the merits.
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Even a Participation Trophy is Too Big a Burden for the Special Snowflakes™

I played football when I was in high school, but I was nowhere near the best player on the team; I’m neither the strongest, nor the fastest, nor the most athletic person around. Nevertheless, I tried and did my best. Now, in the age of ‘Participation Trophies,’ President Donald Trump has revived the Presidential Physical Fitness Test for public schools: Continue reading →

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Bureaucrats gotta bureaucrat It looks like the Philadelphia School District administration don't want to admit the basis of their problems

We noted, last Friday, the waste case that Martin Luther King High School in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia has become. MLKHS at least has the ‘excuse,’ if it can be called that, of being a school in the depressed East Germantown neighborhood, with 100% of students coming from ‘economically disadvantaged’ families.

But what about a case like this?

One of Philly’s premier high schools is in turmoil, staff, parents, and students say

Enrollment issues, staff divisions and other problems are troubling Philadelphia’s storied High School for Creative and Performing Arts, those inside say.

Continue reading →