Tag Archives: #Education

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The credentialed media: Be just as aware of what you are not being told as what is presented That's how you can spot the biases!

We have reported, several times recently, on how the credentialed media write their stories to obscure the incidences in which teachers accused of sexual abuse are actually being accused of homosexual sexual abuse. I stated explicitly, when I see a story in the credentialed media about the sexual abuse of a minor, if it is written in a manner to obscure the sex of the victim, I suspect that the abuse was homosexual in nature.

So, when I saw this story, in the Lexington Herald-Leader, I had to read it to see if it went along with my suspicions.

Kentucky assistant principal with past discipline issues resigns amid investigation

by Beth Musgrave | Monday, March 4, 2024 | 1:14 PM EST | Updated 5:12 PM EST

An assistant principal at McCreary Central High School has resigned amid a police and state investigation, school officials confirmed Monday.Aaron Anderson resigned Feb. 27 rather than face termination, said Superintendent Brian Crawford.

No, of course the Herald Leader did not include a photo of Mr Anderson, but at The First Street Journal we always include mugshots or other photos of the accused. However, the only image I was able to find was a TikTok video, from which I took a screenshot.

Kentucky State Police is investigating Anderson’s conduct along with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services Department of Community Based Services, which investigates child and adult abuse complaints, said Crawford.

Crawford said he could not comment on the nature of the investigation.

Officials with Kentucky State Police did not immediately respond to questions about the investigation.

Crawford said Anderson has been disciplined in the past. He was suspended with pay in January but Crawford said due to privacy and personnel laws he could not say why Anderson had been disciplined.

In 2017, Anderson was reprimanded by the Educational Professional Standards Board, which oversees educator’s teaching licenses, for having a sexual encounter with an adult on a school bus during an elementary school basketball tournament, according to a September 2017 article in The Voice, the McCreary County newspaper.

So, reporter Beth Musgrave had the 2017 article she referenced, an article which explicitly stated that the “sexual encounter” for which Mr Anderson was “reprimanded” involved an adult woman, and was thus heterosexual in nature. Miss Musgrave was the same Herald-Leader reporter who wrote the initial article about the accusations against April Bradford, and structured it in a manner which concealed the fact that Miss Bradford’s actions were homosexual in nature. Did she also conceal the nature of Mr Anderson’s actions?

Nope!

The allegations came out after the woman later applied for a position with the school system and did not get it. Anderson told investigators the relationship was consensual and he did not have any say in the woman being hired.

So, Miss Musgrave was perfectly willing to tell us when normal sex was involved, but kept it unspoken when the allegations were homosexual in nature. McClatchy reporter Mike Stunson did the same.

However, journalistic honesty requires that I also report different results. As we reported previously, Herald-Leader reporter Valarie Honeycutt Spears did not include whether the sexual offenses alleged against Henry Clay High School teacher Kevin Lentz were heterosexual or homosexual in nature in her original story on August 8, 2023. However, in her follow-up story on August 9th, she did report that the accusations against Mr Lentz involved attempting to lure a 9-year-old boy into the production of child pornography.

I have stated before that I much prefer newspapers to television or radio news, due to my seriously compromised hearing, and because the print media have the ability to treat stories in significantly greater depth. But in reading newspapers, or getting your news from any of the credentialed media sources, you have to be aware of what you are not being told, as much as what is presented.
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The Philadelphia teachers and crappy work attitudes. If some teachers believe that they are not "treated with dignity," it is because other teachers have not been worthy of dignified treatment.

I’ve seen the forms before. In an employee evaluation form from the University of Kentucky, when I was in grad school, there was an attendance section which had four different possible selections, one of which was “Uses sick days as fast/almost as fast as they are accumulated.” And no, that box was not checked in my case; I almost never missed work, and yes, I went to work even when I was not feeling 100%.

I did have a few instances of missing time when I was hospitalized due to Crohn’s Disease, something I have but which is almost completely in remission. My last serious flare-up was in 2012.

However, in an article in Wednesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, on the use of sick days in the city’s public schools, there was one line which told subscribers — yes, it’s another of those “subscribers Only” articles — which encapsulated the problem very succinctly:

“The days were meant for us to take,” said Cristina Gutierrez, a kindergarten teacher at Elkin Elementary in Kensington.

No, Miss Gutierrez, the sick days are not some sort of personal time off that employees are “meant” to take; they are there for employees to use when they are actually sick! Perhaps the Inquirer’s school system reporter, Kristen A Graham, or an editor was as appalled by that statement as I was, given that someone made it the lead photograph, complete with that abysmal quotation, in the online version of the article!

Sick days come with their contract. But Philly teachers get punished for taking them.

10 are allowed each year, but after accumulating a few, instructors are expected to meet with the boss. Then things intensify.

by Kristen A Graham | Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Philadelphia teachers’ contract allows them 10 sick days a year. But they are progressively penalized just for taking them.

No, the teachers are not being punished for using sick days; they are being held to account for abusing sick days.

That means when a teacher comes down with a virus or has a family member with a medical emergency, there’s a constant calculus in the heads of many: Can I afford to take the day off? Will there be consequences for doing so?

The policy, known informally as “3-5-7-9,” works this way: After a teacher’s third “occurrence,” whether a single sick day or the third in a consecutive stretch of days, principals are instructed to have an informal conversation with the instructor and write a memo documenting the episode. After the fifth occurrence, the teacher gets a warning memo in the permanent file; after the seventh, the teacher gets an “unsatisfactory incident” memo in the file and a formal conference. A teacher who reaches nine occurrences gets a second unsatisfactory incident report, a recommended suspension, and conferences with the principal and assistant superintendent.

The policy seems kind of bulky and overly documentarian, but I suppose that’s something that’s required in a large, unionized environment.

My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now!

Miss Graham’s article continues to tell readers “subscribers like (me)” — and I subscribe so that you don’t have to — several different stories about hardships that some teachers have: sick children, handicapped spouses, and the like, many of which would appear to be legitimate concerns.

Much further down:

The policy stems from a case dating 40 years, when a district secretary was fired for poor attendance. The PFT (Philadelphia Federation of Teachers) challenged the termination and ultimately lost; the arbitrator wrote that management can “require reasonably steady attendance as a condition of employment, regardless of the reasons for the absences, since otherwise the employee is of no practical value to the enterprise.”

The PFT contract sets the number of sick days at 10 (plus three personal days), but the arbitration decision gives the district the right to set the 3-5-7-9 policy. The district’s employee relations department tells principals that “progressive discipline uses increasingly more severe penalties to bring about positive change in employee behavior. The goals of progressive discipline are to improve employee output, correct inappropriate behavior, or terminate recalcitrant employees.”

Under the union contract, full-time teachers, referred to as ten-month employees, have a work year defined as 188 days[1]Article XVII, §A and a work day set at 7 hours and 4 minutes, including a duty-free lunch our of 30 minutes in secondary schools, and 45 minutes in elementary schools.[2]Article XVII, §B(1)(a) How many employees in the private sector, who normally have a 244-day work year plus two weeks of vacation, would love to have ten sick days plus three ‘personal’ days? Yet here we have teachers, who get a solid two months off a year, combitching that they can’t use sick days just willy-nilly. I can guarantee you that, if I had taken ten unscheduled says off a year, I’d have been fired in any job I ever had!

The union contract has the sick day provisions in place not to be [insert plural slang term for the anus here], but due to teachers with an attitude as expressed by Miss Gutierrez[3]Perhaps Miss Gutierrez simply expressed herself poorly; I do not know her, so I cannot really judge. But I have been proceeding as though she meant exactly what she said., that sick days are things simply granted to teachers to take off for whatever reasons they have. If the employees had a decent employee attitude, they’d come to work every day they were scheduled to work, do their f(ornicating) jobs, and the Inquirer would have had no story on the subject.

What about Lewis Elkin Elementary School, where Miss Gutierrez teaches? According to US News & World Report, only 5% of students tested at or above grade-level proficiency in reading and 5% scored at or above grade-level proficiency in math. Niche.com gives the school a C- in overall performance, a C- in academics, and a C for quality of teachers.[4]US News & World Report mistakenly called the school Elkin Lewis Elementary, while Niche.com got it right as Lewis Elkin Elementary. Perhaps Miss Gutierrez’s expressed attitude has been shaped by working in a poor school in Kensington, or perhaps the poor school in Kensington has been shaped by her attitude.

Shortly after he started teaching at Building 21, a district high school in West Oak Lane, Julian Prados Franks explained his new employer’s sick time policy to his family. His father, a casino worker, was mystified.

He said, “‘They do what?’” said Prados Franks, who has not incurred consequences for using his sick time — yet. “This policy just demonstrates a fundamental distrust between the district and the teachers; that level of control makes it feel like we’re not adults, like we don’t deserve to be treated with dignity.”

It’s simple: the Philadelphia Public Schools are unionized, and the union contract has to specify how teachers who do not act like adults have to be treated and subjected to discipline. Mr Prados Franks may very well be one of the good guys, but the School District has to have the policies in place for everyone — and Miss Graham’s article noted that there have been complaints that the policy has not been enforced evenly — good and bad. If some teachers believe that they are not “treated with dignity,” it is because some teachers have not been worthy of dignified treatment.

You know, we used to have a pretty strong work ethic in this country, and some of us still do. We go to work and do our jobs, every day we are scheduled to work. I’ve had to work many Saturdays in my career, and not a few Sundays as well. I’ve worked 19 full days in a row before, and one year, because another worker had a heart attack, I had only two work days off all year, no vacations, nothing.

But now we have a generation of whiners, and I find it sickening.

References

References
↑1 Article XVII, §A
↑2 Article XVII, §B(1)(a)
↑3 Perhaps Miss Gutierrez simply expressed herself poorly; I do not know her, so I cannot really judge. But I have been proceeding as though she meant exactly what she said.
↑4 US News & World Report mistakenly called the school Elkin Lewis Elementary, while Niche.com got it right as Lewis Elkin Elementary.
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Brown University Students for Justice in Palestine end their hunger strike Noble Hahvahd students staged their own twelve hour hunger strike in solidarity.

When I heard about the hunger strike by the Brown University Students for Justice in Palestine, I asked, admittedly mockingly, for them to define exactly what they meant by a hunger strike. I did point out, at one point, that human beings going more than three days without water can lead to serious problems or even death.

Of course, they never answered, so I didn’t know exactly what they meant. But I got an answer, of sorts, from The Harvard Crimson:

More Than 30 Harvard Students Hunger Strike for 12 Hours in Solidarity With Brown Protesters

By Michelle N. Amponsah and Azusa M. Lippit, Crimson Staff Writers | Monday, February 12, 2024

More than 30 pro-Palestinian Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike Friday in solidarity with 17 students at Brown University who refused to eat for eight days to pressure the Brown Corporation to divest from Israel.

If the Brown University hunger strikers really did refuse to eat for eight days, that is something of an accomplishment. Eight days is not enough for a reasonably health person to starve to death, but it’s going to be pretty uncomfortable after three days or so. But the Crimson telling us that 30 pro-Hamas Palestinian Harvard students participated in a 12-hour hunger strike is just plain mockworthy. I’ve gone through plenty of 12-hour-workdays in which I had nothing to eat because I was just too plain busy to take a lunch; that’s something that can happen in the ready-mixed concrete industry.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and millions of Catholics around the world will be engaged in a 12-hour fast; it’s something we also do on Good Friday. Me? I’m giving up soda for the entire seven weeks of Lent; do I get some kind of political credit for a 46-day Mountain Dew strike? 🙂

Nineteen students at Brown began the strike — which was originally indefinite — on Feb. 2, ahead of the Brown Corporation’s planned meetings beginning Feb. 8.

The students intended to strike until the Brown Corporation considered a resolution to divest from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine,” but they ended the strike[1]Documentary hyperlink added by D R Pico, and was not in the Harvard Crimson original. Given that the paragraph cites the Brown Daily Herald, the failure to include the hyperlink is pretty poor … Continue reading after Brown University president Christina H. Paxson denied their request, citing “now-obsolete demands,” per the Brown Daily Herald.

The 17 students ended their strike at 5 p.m. on Feb. 9, along with the Harvard demonstrators and more than 200 other Brown students who fasted for 32 hours in solidarity.

The Brown Daily Herald Editorial Page Board included an editorial documenting the history of hunger strikes at the University and beyond, noting that very few hunger strikers actually starved themselves to death. But the hunger strike, while an extreme method of peaceful protest, relies on the people against whom they are striking to actually care about whether the hunger strikers suffer, or even whether they live or die.

References

References
↑1 Documentary hyperlink added by D R Pico, and was not in the Harvard Crimson original. Given that the paragraph cites the Brown Daily Herald, the failure to include the hyperlink is pretty poor journalism from these Harvard journalism students!
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We’re not really serious about rape Don't look for complicated answers when there are simple solutions to the problem

We have previously reported on sex crimes against minors in Kentucky, and this morning, the Lexington Herald-Leader continued an investigative effort that began at the end of 2022, with the story “Kentucky’s laws on teacher sexual misconduct are weak. Here’s what needs to change.

Kentucky lawmakers failed to address teacher sex abuse last year. Will they in 2024?

by Beth Musgrave and Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Thursday, February 1, 2024 | 11:00 AM EST | Updated: 11:30 AM EST

Andrew Zaheri, mugshot via Rowan County Detention Center and is a public record.

It started with massages for leg cramps after soccer practice when she was 14.Andrew Zaheri’s attentions to the teenage girl quickly escalated, according to court documents.

No, of course what my best friend used to call the Herald-Liberal didn’t include Mr Zaheri’s mugshot, but at The First Street Journal we believe such to be public records, and do publish them. Continue reading →

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The hits just keep coming

Much has been made of the deep-pockets donors who have withdrawn support for colleges and universities which turn a blind eye — at best — to anti-Semitism on campus. When I spotted the article cited below in my news feed, I just assumed it was about Bill Ackman, but that wasn’t the case.

Major Harvard donor withdraws financial support amid ongoing anti-Semitism backlash

Ken Griffin is the latest wealthy alumnus to halt payments over university’s handling of hate speech on campus following Oct 7 attacks

Continue reading →

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Money talks

Our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, loaded up with the #woke as it is, has yet another story defending the University of Pennsylvania’s departing President, Liz Magill, who was forced out after she made a boneheadely stupid, as in dumb as a box of rocks stupid, statement in testimony to a congressional committee that calls to ‘kill all the Jews’ would be a violation of the University’s rules or code of context depending on the context in which such calls were made. Dr Magill, we are told, was new on campus, there for only 18 months, while Claudine Gay has been at Hahvahd for 15 years, and had a lot more friends and good contacts there. There were anti-Semitic incidents on campus even before Hamas’ October 7th attack, and Penn’s faculty didn’t write the support letters that Dr Gay and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth got.

And, of course, Dr Gay is black, while Dr Kornbluth is Jewish.

“I do not think it’s a coincidence that the lone president who had to walk the plank was the white Catholic,” (Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education) said.

There’s more:

One major difference at Harvard was a letter signed by more than 650 faculty calling on the university to keep Claudine Gay; its board announced last week that she would remain. A group of current and former MIT faculty leaders also issued a letter of support for their president, Sally Kornbluth, and the board of trustees there also backed her, according to the Washington Post.

But faculty at Penn wrote no such letter for Magill, a former University of Virginia provost and lawyer who had begun her tenure less than 18 months earlier.

Now, however, the faculty senate is circulating a letter to the board of trustees, already signed by more than 880 faculty members, that opposes “all attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”

I’m not certain how the Trustees are “external actors,” given that they are the ones who are ultimately responsible for the safety and financial security of the University. And the donors? We already know that the students and faculty don’t particularly care for the deep-pockets donors giving multi-million dollars gifts to their alma mater, and the donors have no official power. The previously mentioned Dr Zimmerman, who is also an Inquirer columnist — something reporter Susan Snyder‘s original failed to note — who wrote, before October 7th that people ought not to lose their jobs because they have tweeted something the ‘other side’ finds objectionable:

The only solution is to let everyone tweet what they wish, whether you agree with them or not.

I have been fully supportive of people tweeting exactly what they wish, and do not want the anti-Semitic tweets censored, not because I support what they are saying, but because I very much want the anti-Semites to tell us exactly who they are, so that we can avoid them, and avoid doing business with them. I completely support the things we have previously reported about deep-pocket university donors closing their checkbooks due to anti-Semitism on campus, and creating ‘do not hire’ lists of the haters of Jews. Dr Zimmerman was similarly displeased that the deep-pockets donors were using their money to fight anti-Semitism.

Also read: Business Insider, “Billionaire who has previously donated at least $270 million to Harvard will pause donations to univer-sity, CNN reported

“But if the donors have no official power to “interfere with (Penn’s) academic policies and to undermine academic freedom,” they do have one very important power, that being to either contribute or not contribute to the University. You’d think that a University which houses the Wharton School, the oldest and most prestigious business school in the country, which is arguably better known that the University itself, and the one which has produced a very substantial portion of the deep-pockets donors, would understand that.

We do have and should have freedom of speech and of the press, but if people can speak freely, then others have the right to listen to them, and if they disagree, choose not to support them. Yes, the students and faculty at Penn have a perfect right to say or publish anything they want, but the donors have the right to decide not to support them.

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The Inky tries another tactic to defend Liz Magill

This website has repeatedly noted the efforts of The Philadelphia Inquirer to paint over the abysmal failures of Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and especially Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania in their utterly and completely boneheaded testimony before a House Education Subcommittee. Well, another day, and another tactic, somewhat along the lines of a defense attorney with an obviously guilty client throwing all kinds of [insert slang term for feces here] against the wall, hoping to see something stick. Continue reading →

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As dumb as a box of rocks

Sadly, while ignorance can be cured through education, there’s really no cure for stupid!

I got this image via a tweet from Guy Benson, and it’s just shaking my head stupid. Just what do they believe that the ‘Palestinian’ Arabs think about “feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color”? According to Amnesty International:

Women’s and girls’ rights
According to the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling, 29 women were killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by their family members in apparent cases of domestic violence. In September, the Gaza authorities prevented sisters Wissam and Fatimah al-Assi, aged 24 and 20 respectively, from pursuing complaints for domestic violence through courts by impeding them from accessing a prosecutor to testify.

LGBTI people’s rights
Authorities failed to prevent and investigate homophobic and transphobic threats and attacks.

On 9 July, security forces stood by and watched as a mob beat youths and children participating in a parade organized by Ashtar Theatre in Ramallah that included rainbow flags. The attack came amid a wave of incitement to violence and hate speech against LGBTI people and feminists that the authorities failed to investigate.

The last I heard, Amnesty International was not some evil reich-wing organization!

Male homosexual activity is a criminal offence, punishable by up to ten years imprisonment, and worse. From The Jerusalem Post, written well before the current unpleasantness:

According to Palestinian law, being gay is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and in Gaza, it’s punishable by death. In 2016, Hamas executed a senior commander by firing squad in Gaza for homosexual activity. LGBTQ+ Palestinians have no legal protections against discrimination, are forbidden from adopting and gay marriage is not recognized in any capacity.

In this Pride month alone, the LGBTQ+ community has been threatened and silenced in Ramallah, forcing a concert of east Jerusalem’s Bashar Murad to be canceled when anti-gay activists marched into a concert venue and demanded the organizers cancel the event for the LGBTQ+ community.

According to Wikipedia, Northwestern University has an acceptance rate of just 7%, so one would think that the student body would be fairly intelligent, but if you did think that, apparently you’d be wrong. The University has a guesstimated annual cost of attendance of a whopping $91,290, including room-and-board.

But it doesn’t matter: at least their College Feminists are as dumb as a box of rocks.

Palestinian liberation is an intersectional issue, and goes hand in hand with feminist values of protecting women and queer people of color. As intersectional feminists, we are against all forms of oppression, including settler colonialism.

Really? As students in Evanston, Illinois, they are living on the land of the Illini and Ho-Chunk Indian tribes; have they shown their opposition to “settler colonialism” by giving up their homes and property to those tribes? Or is it the usual: they oppose other people’s settler colonialism, but have Reasons to keep what they have personally?

Ignorance, as stated earlier, can be cured by education, by teaching the person who doesn’t know something what he doesn’t know! But one would think that the Northwestern University College Feminists would have learned by now that Islam forbids homosexual activity, and most of the nations in the Muslim Middle East have legal prohibitions on such, prohibitions which are of varying severity, up to and including death, especially in Iran, which supports Hamas to the tune of an estimated $100 million per year. One would have thought that the College Feminists would have heard of the dissent in Iran which started over the religious police’s killing in custody of an Iranian woman for not properly wearing a head scarf.

Perhaps the College Feminists simply don’t understand the meaning of the word they like to throw around, intersectionality:

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.[1] Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, species[2] and physical appearance.[3] These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.[4][5] However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.[6]

Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender,[7] to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s differing experiences and identities.

Does that sound like gobbledygook to you? It should, but it seems that the College Feminists have assumed the position that all people who are supposedly oppressed have something in common, when they really do not. Were Hamas to actually take over, and the Northwestern University College Feminists living there, they’d be among the first ones lined up against the wall.

Feminism and progressive politics are things which can exist in Western civilizations, another term they’d probably hate, but it’s only under the enlightenment and Christian European and English-speaking North American societies where these things are even allowed to exist. The things people have the freedom to do and say in Iceland and Ireland and Israel are not allowed in Iran or Iraq or Indonesia, and trying them can get you beaten, imprisoned or even killed.

For $91,290 a year, you’d think that they could have learned that.

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You in a heap o’ trouble, girl!

At some point, you’d think that education professionals, all of whom have collegiate degrees, would be smarter than this, but I guess if you did think that, you’d be wrong. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A guidance counselor at a Bucks County middle school had a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student, police say

Kelly Schutte had multiple sexual encounters with the teen this year, both in her car and at the teen’s home in West Rockhill Township, according to police.

by Vinny Vella | Friday, November 10, 2023 | 12:52 PM EST | Updated: 2:21 PM EDT Continue reading →