Tag Archives: #Education

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The Philadelphia Inquirer laments job losses by women due to COVID-19 But somehow the paper doesn't tell readers that those job losses were pushed by Democrats and women

Being in The Philadelphia Inquirer, even in the business section, it was going to be an opinion piece, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have some good statistics:

Job or kids? One in three working moms forced to choose as pandemic enters Year Two.

Kids at home, chores, and full-time career? Philly’s burnt-out moms quit jobs in droves, setting women back for years. Solutions? Flex time, backup childcare and $39 billion in federal relief.

by Erin Arvedlund | Sunday, March 14, 2021

After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason — she has children.

“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years of age living in Haddonfield. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.

With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.

Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.

There’s more at the original, but the subtitle tells you much of what you need to know: the very #woke Erin Arvedlund Beattie, who “cover(s) all things personal finance and investing, as well as Wall Street frauds and other miscreants,” wants changes in how businesses operate and, of course, taxpayer money to address the issue.

Day care centers, Mrs Beattie told us, saw enrollment greatly decline, while expenses for new equipment and more thorough cleaning increased; “up to 40%” of dat care centers eventually shut down. What she did not say is that, in many cases, state and local governments ordered day care centers closed. In the Bluegrass State, Governor Andy Beshear ordered all daycare centers closed by the end of business on Friday, March 20, 2020. A lawsuit finally got a Boone County judge to set aside that order, on July 2nd, 15 weeks later, but, of course, the Governor appealed, and just two weeks later the state Supreme Court voided all of the state court injunctions against the Governor’s orders, saying that it would decide all of the cases. The Court scheduled oral arguments for September 17th, and did not issue its decision until November 12th, upholding the Governor.

Many states had similar government action concerning day care centers. That Mrs Beattie neglected to mention this in her reasons that so many day care centers have closed down is pretty poor journalism.

Mrs Beattie had a subtitled section “Schools must open”:

Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double-duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores, and cooking endless meals.

”This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman says. ”As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”

As executive director of the political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.

“Why do we not know? This alone is a catastrophe for working women with dependents, and it’s only part of the tsunami destroying their careers,” said Perelman, who has a 6-year-old.

“For women, there’s no going back to work without school.”

However, the greatest resistance to reopening schools fully comes from the teachers’ unions, which are roughly ¾ female. More, President Biden’s criteria for reopening are nowhere close to a full reopening, according to The Washington Post:

Since making his 100-day goal, Biden and his aides have repeatedly loosened their definition of an open school, making it easier to meet his target.

Schools where children are in buildings even one day a week will count as “open.” Opening “most” schools means 51 percent, a metric the nation has probably already reached. And high schools, which are the most likely to be online only, aren’t counted in the measurement at all.

If in-person instruction is only one or two days per week, that isn’t going to get mothers back to work.

Let’s be honest here: the public schools perform a function that teachers are loath to admit, that they serve as free day care centers for children for most of the workday. Opening up paid day care centers because the kids aren’t in school becomes an added expense for working families, primarily, as Mrs Beattie pointed out, working mothers. At some point, calculations have to be made: is it costing more for mothers to work than they bring home from work?

Back to Mrs Beattie’s original for one final point:

Ellen Yin, one of Philly’s top restaurateurs, had to fire 150 workers last spring, roughly 90% of her staff.

“Our industry has large numbers of undocumented workers and immigrants, many of whom never had income before,” she said. “They don’t qualify for unemployment, and that weighs on us.”

There is little which pisses me off more than this: If “one of Philly’s top restaurateurs” has been employing “large numbers of undocumented workers,” she shouldn’t be receiving our sympathy but prison time! At a time when we have 9,972,000 million people officially unemployed, along with 8,493,000 more who have dropped out of the workforce and are thus not counted as officially unemployed, based on February 2020 numbers, 18,465,000 people who ought to be working but aren’t, the last thing we should be worrying about are jobs for illegal immigrants!

As William Teach noted, COVID-19 cases have begun to fall in Florida, even though Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rolled back restrictions much sooner than in most states, raising the obvious question: did the restrictions actually reduce the spread of the virus, or did they simply force a recession for no useful reason?

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A Futile and Stupid Gesture

One of the great lines from the movie Animal House was Eric “Otter” Stratton’s, after all of the fraternity Delta Tau Chi members had been expelled, and their draft boards notified that they were all now 1-A and eligible for conscription, “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.”

And so we come to my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, and Sigma Alpha Epsilon. ΣΑΕ was already in trouble with the University for violating COVID-19 protocols and, Heaven forfend! drinking alcohol.

Double Secret Probation . . . .

From the Kentucky Kernel:

Fraternity suspension linked to burglary investigation, parties

Natalie Parks | January 31, 2021 | Updated: February 1, 2021

Documents from Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s student conduct hearing reveal new details in the fraternity’s suspension, including members’ involvement in a burglary case and violations of COVID-19 protocol that the hearing committee said showed “an extreme disregard for human life.”

SAE’s student organization status was revoked in December following a student conduct hearing and appeals process.

According to an initial incident report, fraternity members broke into a Lexington house in September and were confronted by police. In emails obtained by the Kernel through an open records request, University of Kentucky administrators called the incident “pretty severe.”

UK police said the conflict began over a rental dispute. The house involved was owned by the mother of an SAE member and rented by a redacted individual.

“SAE members claimed that [redacted] told the landlord that they were SAE so that they could rent the house, and upon finding this out, SAE members told the landlord. [Redacted] claimed that SAE was upset that they attempted to rent the house when SAE’s lease was in limbo,” said the incident report, submitted to the acting director of the Office of Student Conduct on Sept. 25, 2020.

The report describes the following conflict as a “large physical altercation involving UK [redacted].”

At 2:30 a.m. on Sept. 25, 30 – 40 SAE members entered the house by breaking a window and knocking down a door while “allegedly armed with golf clubs and other dangerous instruments.” Blood would be found inside, and various items damaged.

8 – 10 residents were inside and cornered by SAE members.

“SAE members broke a TV, threw beer bottles, and cornered [redacted] in the house, making threats and pushing/shoving,” the report reads. When Lexington police arrived, SAE members fled to another house where they barricaded themselves inside and refused to open the door.

My younger daughter, an Army veteran and IT professional, told me about this one, so I just had to share it!

Looks like it’s time to watch Animal House again!

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Remember the actions of the teachers’ unions the next time they try to play the “we care about your children” card as they are seeking more money. We might as well consider the entire education year lost

It looks like The Wall Street Journal has caught up with us:

The Tragedy of the Schools

Many parents are losing faith in their closed public schools—and are looking for alternatives.

By Daniel Henninger | February 3, 2021 | 5:46 PM EST

Among its multiple alterations, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020-21 may be undermining the role of public schools in the United States, in place since the middle of the 19th century. It is a reassessment that is long overdue.

A relevant anecdote is Ronald Reagan’s famous explanation that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. Across the country the past year, that has been the experience of parents with children in many of the nation’s public systems—abandoned by schools they’ve supported with their tax dollars.

In Chicago, the nation’s third-largest system is on the brink of a strike, despite pleas from the city’s progressive mayor, Lori Lightfoot, for the teachers to return. Unions are resisting opening in Los Angeles, Boston, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Washington. Michael Mulgrew, head of the teachers union in New York City, says the schools may not open “until September.”

San Francisco’s Board of Education has enough time on its hands to vote 6-1 to cancel the names of 44 Americans from their public schools. On Wednesday, the city sued its own school board for failing to get the schools open.

Though teaching modes vary by state, what data exist suggests in-person teaching at public schools is below 25%, while it’s about 60% at private schools, which have largely reopened.

At the start of the pandemic, the closures were understandable. They no longer are, with even the oh-so-careful Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying there is scant evidence of significant virus transmission among grade-school-age children.

There’s more at the original.

A lady named Phyllis tweeted:

The employees of Kroger, Meijer and WalMart all had ‘essential’ jobs to which to go, and if they refused, they’d lose their jobs. Losing jobs due to refusing to work is not the kind of thing which makes you eligible for unemployment. I would guess that the vast majority of the people who worked at those stores worked there because they needed to work.

The public school teachers? They never missed a single paycheck, and as long as they could teach ‘remotely,’ why not? After all, who cares if ‘remote learning’ does not produce good results? The teachers get to avoid unruly classrooms, and many of them get to teach from their own homes. No commute, no nasty winter weather, just a nice, toasty computer session, perhaps with the fireplace going.

The private and parochial schools fought to reopen, sometimes having to sue authoritarian state decrees, because the parents wanted them open, and the schools have to stay open to stay open; private schools don’t have the government pot of money to remain open, and they need the tuition.

But Phyllis got it wrong: it has nothing to do with the “courage” of various employees. Rather, it has to do with the selfishness of the teachers’ unions. Already blessed with 180-day work years, rather than the 240 — and often more — that most people have, they find that they like not having to get out of bed earlier, not having to drive to work. A Keurig and they can easily skip the stop at Turkey Hill for a morning cup of coffee, and, depending on their set-up, can even stay in their pajama bottoms and slippers. Great, huh?

Just remember what they’re doing the next time teachers try to play the “we care about your children” card as they are seeking more money.

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Schadenfreude! Hard left feminist decries surge in homeschooling, but the surge is caused by leftist teachers’ unions trying to keep public schools closed

Feminist Jill Filipovic McCormick is not a fan of home schooling:

Right-wing groups love to push homeschooling because it helps keep kids away from material that might challenge their conservative worldview, and it keeps women out of work and in the home. It’s a pretty transparent set of motivations, not good for women or children.

This is a pet issue of mine and some day I’ll write about it at length, but the whole conversation about homeschooling would go very differently if we believed children had a right to a high-quality education — or if we believed children had rights at all, separate from parents.

Please do note that my tweet talks about what motivates right-wing groups to push homeschooling — it does not say that parents who homeschool have a single set of motivations (they certainly do not). Plz work on reading comprehension before you teach your kids.

…and just observing how many people on the right are big mad at the idea that “children should have rights.

The previous four paragraphs are the rest of the Twitter thread Mrs McCormick posted; it’s simply easier for the reader for me to copy and paste them; no changes to her text have been made.

Twitchy noted many objections made to Mrs MCormick’s tweets, which you can read if you follow this link.

I had made a few reply tweets to her:

Yet the teachers’ unions, which are 75% female, want to keep the public schools closed to in-person classes, forcing primarily women to stay at home to care for their children. The teachers still get paid, but many of the other public school employees are out of work.

It’s been women’s careers which have been more negatively impacted by the virus, yet it’s the heavily female, politically liberal teachers’ unions which have been most resistant to resuming in-person classes.

Here’s How the Pandemic Is Affecting Women’s Careers: Women have been disproportionately hit by job losses and many of those who are working say they may have to step back.

And, of course, parents who can somehow afford it have shown a tendency to pull students from the closed-to-in-person instruction public schools in favor of private, frequently religious, private schools

Public Schools Will Struggle Even More as Parents Move Kids to Private Ones During the Pandemic.

Then there’s the President attempting to force acceptance of ‘transgenderism’ on the public schools. Why would it surprise anyone that some parents might not accept that, and choose to abandon the public schools?

Now, I was going to let it go at that, until I opened The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website this morning, and found this gem:

Philly teachers union says it’s ‘not safe’ to reopen schools. It wants the city to intervene.

by Kristen A. Graham and Maddie Hanna | February 4, 2021 | 9:20 AM EST

The city teachers union says it doesn’t have confidence buildings are safe for reopening, setting up a showdown with the Philadelphia School District over a planned Monday return for some teachers.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan (David Maialetti/ The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan said Wednesday night he has called on the city to assign a neutral third party who will examine evidence presented by both sides and decide whether buildings are in suitable shape for a return.

That’s a move open to Jordan based on a memorandum of understanding signed by the union and district in the fall, requiring the involvement of the Mayor’s Office of Labor and a “world-renowned physician” to weigh in swiftly on reopening disputes. If the outside expert determines the district is not in compliance with safety standards, they will direct the school system to fix the problems.

After weeks of back and forth and meetings with district officials Monday and Tuesday, Jordan said he still had deep concerns over ventilation, especially in schools where window fans are still being installed to improve air flow, and other safety issues.

There’s more at the original, but it all boils down to one thing: no matter what the school district does, it will never be enough. Here in the Bluegrass State, the Fayette County schools remain closed for other “reasons,” even though the Commonwealth has begun COVID-19 vaccinations prioritizing teachers.

The Inquirer article noted that the Philadelphia public schools have been closed to in-person instruction since last March; that’s eleven months! And if the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers gets its way, the schools will be closed to in-person instruction for a full year.

We might as well face facts: we have lost an entire educational year! From The Washington Post:

It’s time to admit it: Remote education is a failure

Opinion by Helaine Olen, Columnist | December 2, 2020 | 11:32 AM EST

Whenever someone expressed concerns about the quality of remote education back in the early days of covid-19, they were all but shamed into silence. No, the spring did not go well, but that was done on the fly, with next to no preparation. No, it’s not an ideal solution, but staying with in-person instruction is out of the question. There is a learning curve, we were told. We’ll get this thing right with time.

Here’s how that worked out: In Houston, the number of students with failing grades is exploding. In St. Paul, Minn., a high school student is almost as likely to be on track to fail a class as pass it. In the junior high and high schools of Fairfax County — one of the wealthiest counties in the United States — 1 out of 10 students flunked at least two classes, and the number was almost double that for those with disabilities. Enrollment is falling in closed school districts from coast to coast and many points in between. Some children are exiting for private schools, or private pods. Others are simply MIA.

In the vast majority of cases, remote learning is a poor substitute for in-person education — no matter what efforts are made, no matter how many teacher trainings are offered.

It’s not simply a matter of subpar or nonexistent Internet or computer access, something that impacts students from more than 4 million households. Small children, as it turns out, will not sit in front of a computer to listen to a teacher or complete an assignment without supervision. That means millions of parents — for the most part, moms — got conscripted as unpaid teacher’s assistants. And while older children don’t need parents next to them in order to do their work, they often won’t do it regardless.

There’s more at the original, and yes, it is an opinion columnist who wrote it, but Helaine Olen included a lot of linked information, which is why I chose to use it.

We have frequently noted the efforts of private schools to open, despite the orders of state Governors. And private school enrollment has reversed a decades-long decline and showing increased enrollment. The number of students being homeschooled has shot up as well, though some officious bureaucrats are trying to stop that.[1]Full disclosure: My daughters attended parochial schools for part of their education.

I will admit to some schadenfreude here: it is the actions of the public school teachers and their unions which are helping to increase both private and parochial school enrollments and homeschooling, the very thing Mrs McCormick hates. It isn’t we evil reich-wing conservatives forcing and keeping the public schools closed; it’s the actions of the primarily liberal and Democratic public school teachers and their unions.

References

References
↑1 Full disclosure: My daughters attended parochial schools for part of their education.
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Government ‘remote education’ orders driving people to the private schools Or at least that's happening for those who can afford it

The private religious schools have been fighting Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) orders to close; the public school teachers’ unions are fighting to keep the schools closed . . . at least as long as they are still getting paid. The only surprise to me is that the enrollment decreases are so small.

Think about this: these aren’t parents just looking for daycare. Enrolling your kids in private school costs serious money. Home schooling takes time out of your day that could be spent earning money, and once you start home schooling, it’s not that easy to say, well, the public schools just reopened, so I can send my kids back there.

From the Lexington Herald-Leader:

COVID-19 cutting school enrollment? Hundreds of kids leaving Fayette schools.

By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | December 29, 2020 | 10:51 AM EST

Morgan Dezarn is moving her first grade daughter in January from Fayette County Public Schools to private school. She is among hundreds of Lexington parents leaving the district during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our daughter missed several months of kindergarten when schools closed in March and I just do not have faith in FCPS at this point to put a plan in place that gets kids back to school five days per week,” Dezarn said. School district officials have said they won’t return to widespread in-person learning, which shut down in March, before Jan. 11. Gov. Andy Beshear has recommended that no Kentucky school in a critical “red zone” county resume in-person classes before Jan. 11.

As we have previously noted, the Supreme Court denied the private religious schools the injunction they requested, stating that the Governor’s executive order was set to expire on January 4th anyway, and there was “no indication that it will be renewed.”

Uhhh, yes, there is, and was at the time, such an indication, as the Governor ‘recommended,’ but did not actually order, schools to remain closed for another week, until January 11th. The Governor may be vindictive and venal, but he isn’t stupid: he knows that he can make it an order on Saturday, January 2nd, and it would once again force the private schools closed. The Supreme Court said that, if the Governor renewed his order, they could appeal once again, saying:

Under all of the circumstances, especially the timing and the impending expiration of the Order, we deny the application without prejudice to the applicants or other parties seeking a new preliminary injunction if the Governor issues a school-closing order that applies in the new year.

That, of course, just costs more time and money, and allows the Governor to keep denying the people’s constitutional rights. Back to the Herald-Leader original:

Numbers obtained under the Kentucky Open Records Act show that after growing in all but one of the last six years, Fayette County Public Schools has seen a decrease in enrollment in the fall semester of 2020 that officials are attributing to COVID-19.

Enrollment dropped from Dec. 1, 2019, to December 1, 2020, by 730 students, from 41, 251 to to 40,521.

With the exception of the 2017-18 school year, when Kentucky’s kindergarten entry date changed from Oct. 1 to Aug. 1, enrollment in Fayette County grew every school year since at least 2014-15. . . .

What is happening in Lexington is similar to a national trend. The Denver Post reported recently that public schools enrollment in that state is down for the first time in 30 years.

Enrollment in Missouri and North Carolina for example, are down 3 percent to 5 percent. “At New York City Public Schools, the country’s largest district, 31,000 fewer students — a 3.4 percent drop — are on rosters this year, according to Chalkbeat.” And in a survey of more than 60 districts, NPR found the average kindergarten enrollment dropped by 16 percent, the Post reported.

Remember: taking your children out of the public schools does not mean you get to stop paying property or other taxes to support the public schools. Mrs Dezarn, from the original story, will still be paying taxes to support the public schools, while, according to Private School Review, the average private elementary school tuition in Lexington is $9,216.

That’s not cheap. With a median household income of $54,896, the median tuition rate works out to be 16.8% of that, which makes the private school option out of reach for most Lexington families.

‘Remote education’ has been going on since the middle of last March. With Governor Beshear’s orders, as they currently stand — and I would be more surprised if he didn’t extend them than if he did — that’s eight solid months out of a ten month school year, months that have basically been lost, as student failures in schools have doubled and even tripled. And with Anthony Fauxi Fauci, the grossly overhyped director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, having claimed that even with the vaccines, if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer’s end and “normality that is close to where we were before” by the end of 2021, there’s no guarantee that the public schools will open for in-person classes for the rest of the current school year.

COVID-19 is serious, and it can be fatal, but it is not the only serious thing out there. Losing an entire year of education is also serious, and that is what our oh-so-very-concerned governors have cost us.
______________________________________
Cross-posted on RedState.

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A cure worse than the disease

My good friend Donald Douglas has, Alas! cut back on his posting, but he did have this one important pass-it-on post!

Public Schools Are Losing Their Captive Audience of Children

Posted by AmPowerBlog 10:33 AM

At Reason.

But see this, from L.A.T, a couple of weeks ago, “L.A. Unified will not give Fs this semester and instead give students a second chance to pass.”

And this passage especially is killing me, about the push-back against the “no fail” policy:

In April, L.A. Unified prohibited failing grades for the spring semester and also determined that no student’s grade would be lower than it was on March 13, the final day of on-campus instruction. At the time, many teachers and some principals complained that the policy undermined student motivation and some reported a subsequent drop-off in student effort. 

Stocks surge. Retail rises. Unemployment continues to decline. Post-election markets set record highs while online shopping contributed to recovery. How did this month fare overall? 

Such concerns resurfaced Monday during a faculty meeting at a high school in the San Fernando Valley, according to an English teacher who did not wish to be identified because she was not authorized to speak.

“Yes, it’s COVID time,” the teacher said. “But this soft bigotry of low expectations — including us being banned from demanding students ever comment with their voices or actually show themselves on camera during Zoom — will indeed help our low-income students stay on the bottom of the pile of learning.”

A high school principal from a different campus was more supportive. Given the unprecedented crisis, the principal said, students who earn A’s and B’s should get to keep them but that the only other grade handed out should be a pass. This principal — who also was not authorized to comment — requested anonymity…

Astonishing, really.

Notice how everybody speaks off the record, obviously so they won’t face the guillotine.

There have been plenty of stories about students falling behind during the ‘remote instruction’ pushed by COVID-19:

Schools confront ‘off the rails’ numbers of failing grades

by Carolyn Thompson, Associated Press | December 6, 2020

The first report cards of the school year are arriving with many more Fs than usual in a dismal sign of the struggles students are experiencing with distance learning.

School districts from coast to coast have reported the number of students failing classes has risen by as many as two or three times — with English language learners and disabled and disadvantaged students suffering the most.

“It was completely off the rails from what is normal for us, and that was obviously very alarming,” said Erik Jespersen, principal of Oregon’s McNary High School, where 38% of grades in late October were failing, compared with 8% in normal times.

Educators see a number of factors at play: Students learning from home skip assignments — or school altogether. Internet access is limited or inconsistent, making it difficult to complete and upload assignments. And teachers who don’t see their students in person have fewer ways to pick up on who is falling behind, especially with many keeping their cameras off during Zoom sessions.

Well, color me shocked! Many students are keeping their cameras off during Zoom sessions? When a 9-year-old Louisiana student was suspended after a teacher reported seeing a gun in the boy’s bedroom during a virtual class, yeah, I can see why some families might choose not to have the cameras on. The school board refused to remove the idiotic suspension from his record.

There could be other reasons as well. Perhaps a student is still in his pajamas, or his hair is all funky looking because he hadn’t showered that morning. Given that the students seeing increased failing grades have been ‘disproportionately’ poor, maybe, just maybe, the students are living in homes where their rooms don’t look very good. Would a fourth or seventh grader be embarrassed if his bedroom had peeling paint or wallpaper? Yeah, I’d guess so.

So, what do we have? Students receiving twice and thrice as many failing grades, in schools that haven’t banned failure:

The increase in failing grades has been seen in districts of all sizes around the country.

At Jespersen’s school in the Salem-Keizer Public School district, hundreds of students initially had not just Fs, but grade scores of 0.0%, indicating they simply were not participating in school at all. In New Mexico, more than 40 percent of middle and high school students were failing at least one class as of late October. In Houston, 42% of students received at least one F in the first grading period of the year. Nearly 40% of grades for high school students in St. Paul, Minnesota, were Fs, double the amount in a typical year.

Yet teachers, and their unions, have been protesting plans to return to in-classroom instruction.

We have, of course, noted Governor Andy Beshear’s (D-KY) forcing both public and private schools to close to in-class instruction through at least January 4, 2021, and possibly beyond.

Let me be clear about this: students are losing an entire year of education due to the government’s response to COVID-19. In Kentucky, Governor Beshear has prioritized vaccine for teachers, which would “give the school district ‘a path’ to return to in-person learning for the first time since the pandemic began in March,” but even that depends upon when the teachers could get the immunizations. The Centers for Disease Control noted that:

All but one of the COVID-19 vaccines that are currently in Phase 3 clinical trials in the United States use two shots. The first shot starts building protection. A second shot a few weeks later is needed to get the most protection the vaccine has to offer.

And that:

It typically takes a few weeks for the body to produce T-lymphocytes and B-lymphocytes after vaccination. Therefore, it is possible that a person could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 just before or just after vaccination and then get sick because the vaccine did not have enough time to provide protection.

How long between the initial shot and the booster?

Both the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines require two shots: a priming dose, followed by a booster shot. The interval between Moderna doses is 28 days; for the Pfizer vaccine, it’s 21 days.

So, if teachers get the initial shot on January 4th, they wouldn’t receive the booster shot until January 25th with the Pfizer vaccine, and February 1st for the Moderna. But there’s more:

The Pfizer vaccine showed efficacy of 95% at preventing symptomatic Covid infection, measured starting from seven days after the second dose was administered. The vaccine appeared to be more or less equally protective across age groups and racial and ethnic groups.

The Moderna vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19, measured starting from 14 days after the second dose. The vaccine’s efficacy appeared to be slightly lower in people 65 and older, but during a presentation to the Food and Drug Administration’s advisory committee the company explained that the numbers could have been influenced by the fact there were few cases in that age group in the trial. The vaccine appeared to be equally effective across different ethnic and racial groups.

So, now we’re up to February 1st before those receiving the Phizer vaccine are protected, and February 15th with the Moderna. That’s another entire month of in-person classes missed. Will Governor Beshear, or other state Governors around the country keep schools closed until then?

You can count on one thing: that’s what the teachers’ unions will want!

Both vaccines seemed to reduce the risk of severe Covid disease. It’s not yet known if either prevents asymptomatic infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor is it known if vaccinated people can transmit the virus if they do become infected but don’t show symptoms.

There is a double-edged sword here. Teachers who are immunized might still carry the virus, and be able to transmit it; no one knows if this is the case yet. The Herald-Leader story noted that:

According to information from the state, (Fayette district spokeswoman Lisa) Deffendall said, “all district employees will be eligible for vaccination; contractors who don’t have direct contact with students are not eligible. Only those on the roster will be eligible for vaccination during the educator distribution period due to the limited availability of the vaccine.”

That means that district employees could pass on the virus to contractors, even if those contractors do not have contact with students.

An important point: none of the vaccines have finished testing on, and been approved for, children. The vaccines might protect the teachers and other school employees, but they aren’t going to protect the students, and that means they won’t stop the virus from being transmitted from home to home.

If you believe that the various Governors have been right, and that the virus is so serious that the schools must be closed to in person instruction, there’s no way we can expect Governors not to keep the schools closed.

Anthony Fauci, the grossly overhyped director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, claimed that even with the vaccines, if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer’s end and “normality that is close to where we were before” by the end of 2021.

(He) said on Wednesday (December 9, 2020) that that estimate is dependent on significant numbers of Americans being willing to be inoculated with one of several vaccines in various stages of development. If 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans are vaccinated in broad-based campaigns likely to start in the second quarter of next year, then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity threshold months later. If vaccination levels are significantly lower, 40 percent to 50 percent, Fauci said, it could take a very long time to reach that level of protection.

“Let’s say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated,” Fauci said. “If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.”

We’re talking well over a year since this started, well after the end of the 2020-21 school year. The end of the 2019-20 school year was ruined, and the guy to whom so many decision-takers listen is warning that this entire school year might be shot as well.

At some point it needs to be asked: is the cure worse than the disease? At least a year of real education will have been lost, and possibly more, to go along with the millions and millions of people thrown out of work and hundreds of businesses which have been bankrupted by our reaction to this virus.

Our constitutional rights to freedom of peaceable assembly have been trashed, our right to freely exercise our religious beliefs have been trampled upon, our people have been prohibited from attending weddings and funerals and some Governors have even tried to ban Thanksgiving and Christmas family dinners.

Human beings are social animals; we need social contact, we need to interact with other people; that’s why solitary confinement in prisons is such an effective, and awful, punishment. But Our Betters have decided that isolation, that solitary confinement — remember: many people do live alone — is part of the solution to COVID-19. In essence, state Governors have decided that the way to save human lives is to not let us be human beings.

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Conservative school administrators forced to resign over social media posts The only shocking thing is that The Philadelphia Inquirer printed the story

William F Buckley, Jr, famously said, “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.” The Pico Corollary to that would be that where liberals get concentrated into greater numbers, they channel their offense into actions against those with other views. And there are no more concentrated pockets of liberalism than in our public education systems. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

School administrators say they were forced to resign over conservative Facebook posts

by Maddie Hanna | December 18, 2020 | 6:36 PM EST

Two former administrators at Montgomery County public schools are suing their school districts, alleging that they were illegally forced out of their jobs over Facebook posts criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and Democratic politicians.

Ashley Bennett — a former special education supervisor at the North Penn School District who appeared Thursday on Tucker Carlson Tonight — and Amy Sacks, a former elementary school principal in the Perkiomen Valley School District, said the districts violated their First Amendment rights, retaliating against them for comments made on their personal Facebook pages.

In Bennett’s case, she said she was forced to resign after a June 24 post that criticized Black Lives Matter, in the wake of national protests over the police killing of George Floyd. “I’m just trying to figure out WHICH black lives matter,” said the post, which someone else wrote but Bennett shared. “It can’t be the unborn black babies — they are destroyed without a second thought.” The post accused the movement of harming Black police officers, and media outlets of ignoring “black on black violence.”

I’m not a teacher or education professional, but I’ve certainly said the same things. The outrage over the killings of George Floyd, a convicted felon with a history of armed robbery and drug use, who was high on fentanyl and methamphetamines when caught passing counterfeit money generated a summer of Mostly Peaceful Protests™, and the left fêted Mr Floyd as though he was some kind of saint, when he was nothing but a criminal and a deadbeat dad. The Professionally Offended™ were outraged when two Philadelphia Police officers shot and killed Walter Wallace, even though body cam footage clearly showed the mentally unstable Mr Wallace approaching them with a raised knife. More Mostly Peaceful Protests™ occurred, and the story was in the Inquirer for days.[1]A site search for Walter Wallace returned 94 articles in the Inquirer.

Yet, just last week, the Inquirer ran an article telling us the names of the then 466 people murdered in the City of Brotherly Love,[2]In the seven days since that article was published, that number has increased by ten, to 476. because nobody other than their families and friends knew about them. Helen Ubiñas wrote:

The last time we published the names of those lost to gun violence, in early July, nearly 200 people had been fatally shot in the city.

Just weeks before the end of 2020, that number doubled. More than 400 people gunned down.

By the time you read this, there will only be more.

Even in a “normal” year, most of their stories would never be told.

At best they’d be reduced to a handful of lines in a media alert:

“A 21-year-old Black male was shot one time in the head. He was transported to Temple University Hospital and was pronounced at 8:12 p.m. The scene is being held, no weapon recovered and no arrest.”

That’s it. An entire life ending in a paragraph that may never make the daily newspaper.

Realistically speaking, a lot of the victims didn’t even get that much of a blurb.

Back to the original story:

While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that public employees can express opinions on matters of public concern — in 1968 upholding Illinois public schoolteacher Marvin Pickering’s right to criticize his school board’s spending on athletics in a letter to the editor — North Penn argued that case might not apply to Bennett’s post.[3]Marvin Pickering v Board of Education of Township High School District 205, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).

“There is no clearly established body of case law as to whether the Pickering test shields from censure a teacher’s social media post dismissing Black Lives Matter as nothing more than an expression of hate for the United States President, denying the existence of systemic racism, and invoking ‘destroyed black babies’ and ‘black on black crime,’ ” the district said in the filing.

Note that the school district, in its legal filing, cites “the existence of systemic racism” as a given, as though it is not a subject up for debate. “(I)nvoking ‘destroyed black babies’ and ‘black on black crime’” is apparently an actionable offense, as though “black on black crime” isn’t a serious issue, and as though black women having abortions at nearly five times the rate white women do is not the truth.

I have said it before: We need to stop pretending that #BlackLivesMatter, because in the City of Brotherly Love, it’s very apparent that they don’t.

In Pickering, the appellant was fired for statements the school board claimed were detrimental to the functioning of the school system itself, namely a letter to the editor arguing against a tax increase for the schools. In the cases at hand, the statements made on social media had nothing to do with the operation of the schools, but were comments on the general political questions of the day, during a very political year. Were these private schools, then yes, those schools would have every right to fire the school administrators, because the First Amendment protects Americans against government action. The schools which went after Ashley Bennett and Amy Sacks were public schools, which are unquestionably part of the government.[4]In Pennsylvania, school districts have independent taxing authority, as fifteen years of my property tax bills unfortunately reflected.

While both cases were originally filed separately in state courts, in Montgomery County and Philadelphia, they have been consolidated and are now filed in federal court. This should probably be a good thing, but only time will tell that.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 A site search for Walter Wallace returned 94 articles in the Inquirer.
↑2 In the seven days since that article was published, that number has increased by ten, to 476.
↑3 Marvin Pickering v Board of Education of Township High School District 205, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).
↑4 In Pennsylvania, school districts have independent taxing authority, as fifteen years of my property tax bills unfortunately reflected.