Tag Archives: #Education

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Just because a public school library does not carry sexually-charged books does not mean that such books are banned

The image to the right is a screen capture if the results I got when I Google searched for libraries in Bucks County. This section of the map shows other libraries.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is, of course, aghast that concerned parents might not want their impressionable children exposed to certain materials, primarily sexually explicit materials, and things which glorify what the federal government has sometimes referred to as “minority sexual attractions.”

A parade against book-banning in Doylestown, as Central Bucks School District targets ‘sexualized content’

Bans, restrictions and challenges to books have reached levels not seen in decades

by Jeff Gammage | Sunday, September 25, 2022

One marcher was costumed as the cover of Lawn Boy, the Jonathan Evison book that was banned for its gay and lesbian content and because it was considered to be sexually explicit.

Another was outfitted as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, which was banned for similar reasons.

Others wore the oversize dust jackets of other books that have been targeted in libraries and school districts for supposedly inappropriate content.

Note the use of language by Jeff Gammage, the Inquirer reporter: “supposedly inappropriate content.” Any responsible editor would have blue-penciled that loaded phrase right away, but there is no evidence that what I have frequently called The Philadelphia Enquirer[1]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt. has any responsible editors.

The Central Bucks school district is prohibiting their school libraries from carrying books and other material which are sexually explicit and age-inappropriate, because a great many parents do not want their children exposed to such. But the school district controls only the public school libraries; the ones listed in the screen capture are the Bucks County free public library system, and they can carry whatever books and material they wish. If some student wants to read All Boys Aren’t Blue he can check the public library, or order it from Amazon. The question is whether the school system should be exposing public school students — and Pennsylvania, like every other state, has a compulsory education law — to a book which details and attempts to glorify the experiences of the author “growing up as a queer Black man in Plainfield, New Jersey.”

In addition to describing Johnson’s own experience, it directly addresses Black queer boys who may not have someone in their life with similar experiences.

Perhaps, just perhaps, some parents do not want their sons and daughters exposed to that.

The district superintendent said the measure would ensure that students read “age-appropriate material,” but civil rights groups have been alarmed.

“No one is saying that every book is or should be appropriate for every child,” said parade organizer Kate Nazemi, a parent with two children in the Central Bucks district, one of the state’s largest. “Librarians and teachers work actively to find the right books for the right kids. They are educators. And they’re being treated like they’re not.”

Well, that’s just it. As we have previously noted, child rearing is the responsibility of parents, and not of the school system or of teachers. More, the public schools and their employees should be subject to the wishes of the taxpayers and parents who fund them, but the “educators” are acting as though they should be supervising the parents, rather than the other way around.

Nazemi, a member of Advocates for Inclusive Education, a coalition that opposes extremism, said district parents have the power to restrict the books seen by their own child. But they shouldn’t have the right, she said, to have a book removed for nearly 18,000 district students.

Of course, once the students are past the schoolhouse door, the parents aren’t present to see what library books their children check out, are reading, or even having passed to them by another student or a teacher. And those students who want to read Lawn Boy can easily get it.

Mr Gammage let his bias creep into his supposedly-straight-news article again, when he described Advocates for Inclusive Education as a coalition that opposes extremism. Their own website has a page The Issues, and all of the issues they have listed stem from a very politically liberal attitude about what schools should teach students about normal and homosexual sex.

Discounting LGBTQ Children’s Social & Emotional Needs
We believe school is a place where children should feel safe to learn and grow together, and where all students are given the tools they need to excel. LGBTQ youth are a legally protected marginalized group who have historically suffered discrimination and therefore need supportive and affirming school policies to ensure their protection.

Issue 1: Affirming Symbols of Support
The Pride Flag has been identified as an effective tool in making students feel supported and welcome in the school environment. We don’t believe it is a divisive and political symbol.

Of course it’s a political symbol! It is a symbol which takes the political position that homosexuality and transgenderism are things to be supported and approved, and it is actively hostile to those who believe that homosexuality is just plain wrong. The public schools should be taking no position, either way, on this.

We are keeping an eye on draft Policy 321 that codifies pride flag removal and more (introduced on 9/14.)

Issue 2: Affirming Names and Pronouns
Some schools in CB are rolling out a new “gender identification procedure” where teachers are not allowed to call a student by their preferred/affirming name unless their parents/guardians have approved this change in the student information database, or the requested name is contained within their name, like Sam for Samantha.

Students must feel safe to learn. We believe this directive will adversely affect academic performance, school attendance, and lead to increases in anxiety and depression.

If “students must feel safe to learn,” I have to ask: do the Advocates care about those normal girls who do not feel safe when boys “identifying” as girls are allowed in the girls’ restrooms and locker rooms? Or doesn’t that feeling of unsafety count?

One wonders what the Advocates for Inclusive Education would say if a student persisted in calling a ‘transgender’ student who wanted to be called Lia by his previous name of William. Would the Advocates state that he should be punished? Jared Jennings, the boy who thinks he’s a girl and goes by the name “Jazz”, whined to Oprah Winfrey:

For the most part boys aren’t really accepting of me because I am transgender and therefore not many guys have crushes on me at my school. They think if they like me they will be called gay by their friends because they like another ‘boy.’

Clearly, there are at least some people who wouldn’t accept young Mr Jennings’ claim that he was actually a girl.

Note that, in every instance, the Advocates for Inclusive Education are pushing policies to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism. Some of us, myself most certainly included, see pushing those types of things as extremism on the left.

Far down in the Inquirer article was a single paragraph which proved that books aren’t banned:

Glenda Childs, owner of the Doylestown Bookshop, set up two displays of banned books in her store, proudly offering them for sale.

I absolutely support Miss Childs and her right to sell what she calls “banned books”. Given that the store website lists Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls as a “banned book,” I’d say that her definition is rather expansive, but that’s another subject.

But Miss Childs and her bookstore are private businesses, which may do as the owners choose; the government may not prohibit her from doing so. Public school libraries? Those are government institutions, and yes, they are subject to the decisions of the public. Other than the Library of Congress, no library in the United States, public or private, carries everything that is published; librarians have to take choices based on what is available, and what they can afford, concerning what they will and will not purchase and carry.

Public school libraries have a special duty, because they have what is, in effect, a captive audience, students in attendance because they are required to be there, by law. And they already take decisions based on content: how many carry Mein Kampf, or, Heaven forfend!, that great American classic, Huckleberry Finn? Do the Advocates for Inclusive Education bemoan schools which do not carry those very famous books, or would the Advocates say that, hey, if you want to read Huckleberry Finn, it’s easily available on Amazon?

The left were horrified, horrified! when some conservatives, looking at the overly-sexualized presentations in support of homosexuality and transgenderism, started calling them “groomers.” But it is reasonable to ask: what purpose other than “grooming” do they have, in their attempts to normalize homosexuality and transgenderism? Tolerance is one thing, but the constant pushing of those subjects is something else entirely.

References

References
↑1 RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but, reminiscent of the National Enquirer as it is, I thought it very apt.
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The myth of “banning books”

Other than the Library of Congress, which is supposed to receive two copies of every copyrighted work, every library in the country exercises some discretion as to what books, magazines and other material to purchase and add to its collection. Discretion is what the Central Bucks School Board has mandated:

Central Bucks approves contentious library policy targeting ‘sexualized content’ in books amid community opposition

The policy, said the superintendent, would create a process for the selection of new books and for parents to challenge “gratuitous, salacious, over-the-top, unnecessary, sexualized content.”

by Oona Goodin-Smith | Tuesday, July 26, 2022

By US Census, Ruhrfisch – taken from US Census website [1] and modified by User:Ruhrfisch, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=808255

Facing heated community opposition, the Central Bucks School District on Tuesday approved a contentious library policy that takes aim at challenging books with “sexualized content” — guidelines the district’s superintendent says ensure students are reading “age-appropriate material,” but that the Pennsylvania Library Association calls one of the most restrictive in schools across the state.

In a 6-3 vote, after a rally and more than an hour of public comment — most of which was vehemently opposing the policy — and questions by some board members about its origins, the Republican-dominated board voted to advance the policy that’s raised alarm among civil rights groups. . . . .

Wielding signs reading “dictators ban books, not democracies,” and “love not hate makes CB great,” dozens of parents, students, community members, educators, and advocates rallied outside the Doylestown school district headquarters Tuesday night ahead of the vote, calling for the board to strike the policy. Many repeated their remarks during public comment before the school board. Only a couple speakers voiced their approval for the policy.

“This is not a ban, this is not censorship, it’s common sense,” said one mother, who said she was “against minors being exposed to sexually explicit content.”

Full disclosure: before I retired, I did some work in Bucks County, and specifically in the Doylestown area, where the Central Bucks School District is located, though none for the schools specifically.

A very obvious point: attendance at school is compulsory for children in the United States, and the public schools have, in effect, a captive audience. Thus, when schools take decisions on what books and other materials are to be housed in their libraries, they are exposing that captive audience to those materials.

Another very obvious point: while the Central Bucks School Board can limit what materials are bought and housed in the schools’ libraries, they have exactly zero authority over library choices in any other place, or over bookstores, or amazon.com, or any other place which buys, sells, lends, or distributes anything. If the students in the district want to read about sex, it’s widely available, in other places, including, sometimes for free, over the internet. Central Bucks is not exactly a poverty-stricken area; it’s difficult to imagine that more than a handful of homes of school-aged children lack internet access.

The public schools do not exist, and should not exist, for sexualizing children. There should be no normalizing of homosexuality or ‘transgenderism,’ or of promiscuity. That’s what concerns normal parents, and that’s what concerned the elected school board. If some parents want their children to learn about abnormal sexuality, hey, that’s on them!

Karen Downer, president of the NAACP’s Bucks County branch, noted that books most frequently flagged for sexual content “tend to include certain themes,” including the history of Black people, LGBTQ topics or characters, and race and racism. The books also are often written by marginalized authors, she said.

Does Miss Debbie Downer mean books which stir up racial strife or that push the normalization of homosexuality? Guess what? Those should not be part of school libraries! If some parents want to stir up racial strife — and, despite bordering Philadelphia at its extreme southeastern end, Bucks County’s population are only 4.7% non-Hispanic black, 6.1% Hispanic, 5.5% Asian, and 82.4% non-Hispanic white — that’s their business, but it should not be what the public schools teach.

“The policy is vague and overbroad,” said Richard T. Ting, an attorney with the ACLU.

“We’re also talking about library books, …not required reading for classwork. This is just books in the library that are there for students, and students should be free to choose what they read. Families should be able to discuss those things with their kids, as well. It shouldn’t be up to a few people … to decide what everyone else gets access to.”

But that’s just it: in any library, “a few people .  .  . decide what everyone else gets access to,” as far as their collection is concerned. Any materials not present in the school libraries can be found elsewhere, often by an internet search, so that people don’t have to leave home to do so. If families wish to discuss “those things,” with their children, they can find “those things” on amazon.com, and download them onto their computers or Kindles immediately.

Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Let’s face it: the “groomers” want to normalize the abnormal, and want to use the public schools to help them with that. Not just no, but Hell no!

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Two more Philadelphia public schools closed due to #COVID19

We noted, just yesterday, that the Philadelphia School District closed Emlen Elementary School due to positive CIVID-19 tests. Now, two more have been shut down.

    COVID-19 has forced three Philadelphia schools to close

    by Rob Tornoe | Wednesdat, September 15, 2021

    The Federalist: Stanford Faculty Smear Professor Who Accurately Summarized Data On Masks

    Three Philadelphia schools have now been forced to temporarily close due to COVID-19 cases, including one Philadelphia School District building.

    Emlen Elementary in East Mount Airy will be shut for in-person learning until Sept. 24, officials said in a letter to families. The K-5 school enrolls about 300 students, all of whom are too young to be vaccinated.

    “Due to multiple positive cases of COVID-19 in our school, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) has determined that our school building will temporarily close from 9-13-21 to 9-23-21 to help stem the spread of the virus,” principal Tammy Thomas wrote to Emlen families Monday. “Students and staff may not return to our school building during this time.”

    In addition, two charter schools — Lindley Academy Charter School and Pan American Academy Charter School — have also been temporarily closed for 14 days due to COVID-19 cases, a city spokesperson said Wednesday.

    Cheryl Bettigole, MD, from her Twitter biography.

    “In general, most transmission is not happening in school, it’s happening at home,” acting Health Secretary Cheryl Bettigole said Wednesday. She said the best way to keep school buildings open is for parents to get themselves and their eligible children vaccinated, and to not send their kids to school when they’re sick.

    “I think most of us imagined most of the spread happening in school, because all these kids are together,” Bettigole said. “But it’s typically the adults bringing it home, and then spreading it in the house.

Really? And how does Dr Bettigole know this? Or is she just defending a mask mandate, which has been in effect for all Philadelphia public schools, since the first day of school, but for which there is no evidence that it has actually slowed or prevented the spread of the virus?

The fact is simple: despite ‘contact tracing,’ despite all of the wailing of the left that they know the hideously unvaccinated are spreading the virus, no one can say that person A caught the virus specifically from person B.

Of course, the school district knows that even fully vaccinated persons can contract and spread the virus, which is why the Philly schools have mandated weekly testing for vaccinated employees.

That’s the important part here: the public schools in Pennsylvania all have these mask mandates, but, how about that, the virus is still spreading.

Despite vaccinations and despite mask mandates, this school year is looking very much like it will be like the last one.

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Philadelphia public schools: will this school year be like last school year?

Governor Tom Wolf’s (D-PA) authoritarian dictates during 2020 pushed the Republicans who control the state legislature to set up two constitutional amendments to rein in a tin-pot dictator, something that certainly sounds familiar to Kentuckians! Well, though those constitutional amendments passed, Governor Wolf found a loophole, getting the state’s Secretary of Health to issue a mask mandate for public schools, but now Mr Wolf is angry because some districts are interpreting ‘exemption’ requirements very loosely. We have previously noted that some districts had chosen not to require masks, and some of the Karens were suing the school district, though they didn’t have the courage to identify themselves.

In the City of Brotherly Love, the public schools have a vaccine mandate, sort of:

    20,000 Philly schools employees must get vaccinated by Sept. 30. Here’s what happens if they don’t.

    If they choose to not get vaccinated, district workers will have to be COVID-19 tested twice a week, and they lose access to a bank of 10 “quarantine leave days.”

    by Kristen A. Graham | Monday, September 13, 2021

    The Philadelphia School District’s 20,000 employees must be vaccinated for COVID-19 by Sept. 30, but they won’t lose their jobs if they opt not to get the shot.

    If they choose to not get vaccinated, teachers, administrators, and support staff — as well as contractors — will have to be COVID-19 tested twice a week, and they lose access to a bank of 10 “quarantine leave days” that allow them to be absent from work with pay if they’re sick with the coronavirus or must isolate because of exposure.

    All employees, regardless of vaccination status, are already tested weekly.

    “The testing provider will return to schools for a second time each week to test partially vaccinated or unvaccinated staff,” Larisa Shambaugh, the district’s chief talent officer, said in an email to staff. “If these employees do not test two times a week, they will be subject to discipline.”

We can see what they are doing here.

COVID testing is unpleasant. A nurse sticks a long stick mounted swab up your nose to try to get material from your sinuses. The Centers for Disease Control said, on August 26, 2021:

    Vaccines are playing a crucial role in limiting spread of the virus and minimizing severe disease. Although vaccines are highly effective, they are not perfect, and there will be vaccine breakthrough infections. Millions of Americans are vaccinated, and that number is growing. This means that even though the risk of breakthrough infections is low, there will be thousands of fully vaccinated people who become infected and able to infect others, especially with the surging spread of the Delta variant.

Since the fully vaccinated can, and do, spread the virus, there’s no logic in letting the fully vaccinated escape testing, if the goal is to prevent the spread of the virus, so the Philadelphia public schools were mandating continued testing of the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. But, if the vaccinated are subjected to the same testing regime as the unvaccinated, then there’s no particular incentive to those who are vaccine hesitant to take the jab. Thus, the school system had to make it worse, by mandating testing twice a week rather than once.

Further down in the Inquirer:

    Most district unions have endorsed the mandate, including the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents 13,000 educators, paraprofessionals, and school nurses. . . . .

    PFT has, in fact, called on the district to require COVID-19 testing for all students. Children are now only tested if they display symptoms during the school day, or if they participate in contact sports or extracurricular activities like band or choir.

If the goal is to prevent the spread of the virus, why not test the students? It’s simple: unless a student’s parents have agreed, in writing, for their child to be tested, something which will be the case for those who sign permission slips for their kids to “participate in contact sports or extracurricular activities like band or choir,” testing students would be considered a physical assault.

If you’ve ever had a COVID test, you know what I mean: while it does not actually harm the subject, it’s a hugely uncomfortable experience that could be used to question prisoners at Guantanamo. If I had a kid in the public schools, and the school system forcibly tested him, I would soon be several million dollars wealthier.

    But Unite Here Local 634, the union that represents food service workers and some school climate staff, is not pleased by the vaccination mandate, said Nicole Hunt, president.

    “I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Hunt said. “For the School District to mandate the vaccine, people will just leave. This is the most vacancies I’ve ever seen.”

The union noted that there were 195 vacant positions in its unionized jobs, and the Inquirer noted that the school district was already short on crossing guards and school bus drivers, something we have already noted.

The Philadelphia School District stated that there were 202,944 students enrolled in the 2020-2021 academic year; the numbers hadn’t been updated for this fall at the time of this writing, and was, in fact, last updated on February 19, 2021, when the schools were almost all ‘virtual.’

Interestingly, though the 2020 census put the city’s non-Hispanic white population at 34.3%, the school district says that only 14% of the student body population are non-Hispanic white. Non-Hispanic blacks make up 38.3% of the city’s population, but 52% of the student body. The other student body percentages are fairly close to their percentage of the population, which tell us one thing: white Philadelphians don’t trust the city’s public schools and are sending their kids to private or parochial schools. We have already noted that the city zip code areas with the highest black percentage of the population have the lowest vaccination rates, meaning that it is probable that a higher percentage of the student body are unvaccinated than normal. Of course, since none of the vaccines have been approved for use in children under 12, the vaccinated percentage of the student body in kindergarten through the fifth grade must be virtually zero.

But those kids can’t be tested unless their parents approve, and even with approval, who wants to be the nurse forcing a swab up into the sinuses of a struggling second grader?

And now there’s this:

    2 weeks into the school year, COVID-19 has closed the first Philly public school

    Learning will continue during the Emlen Elementary building closure; teachers will be instructing students remotely.

    by Kristen A. Graham | Tuesday, September 14, 2021

    Two weeks into the new term, COVID-19 has temporarily closed the first Philadelphia School District building.

    Emlen Elementary, in East Mount Airy, will be shut for in-person learning until Sept. 24, officials announced in a letter sent to families. The K-5 school enrolls about 300 students, all of whom are too young to be vaccinated.

    “Due to multiple positive cases of COVID-19 in our school, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) has determined that our school building will temporarily close from 9-13-21 to 9-23-21 to help stem the spread of the virus,” principal Tammy Thomas wrote in a letter to Emlen families sent Monday. “Students and staff may not return to our school building during this time.”

    Learning will continue during the building closure; teachers will be instructing students remotely, as they did for most students for the entirety of the 2020-21 school year.

    Students who did not share a classroom with an employee or student who tested positive for COVID-19 do not need to quarantine, the letter said.

Now that’s interesting: does this mean that the school district is sharing the identities of those who have tested positive, or simply specifying classrooms?

    Schools officials are following Philadelphia Department of Public Health guidelines to make decisions about when to quarantine students, entire classes, or schools.

    Three or more cases in one classroom requires the class to quarantine; three or more classes across a grade requires a grade to quarantine; six or more cases across grades within a school within 14 days triggers temporary building closure.

    COVID-19 cases among school-aged children are rising sharply.

There’s more at the original, but I can’t be the only person who thinks it probable that we’re going to have another year in public education like the last school year.

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Andy Beshear hates the state legislature, but he had no choice but to call them in

Most of my articles on Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) are primarily sourced from the Lexington Herald-Leader, but he wrangled an invitation from NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, and came to the attention of The New York Times:

    Kentucky governor says the state’s Covid surge is ‘dire.’

    by Melina Delkic | September 5, 2021

    Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY)

    Kentucky’s Democratic governor on Sunday described the state’s surge of Covid cases as “dire,” and pointed out that Republican state lawmakers had limited his options to control the record wave of infections there.

    “If I had the ability to do it right now, we would have a masking order when you are in public and indoors,” said Gov. Andy Beshear, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” news program. “We know that’s a proven way to slow the spread of the virus and ultimately help our health care capacity.”

Right: if the Governor had the authority to issue a statewide mask mandate, he would have done so, and that is precisely why the voters of the Commonwealth gave Republican state legislative candidates such a huge margin in last November’s elections, because Mr Beshear had issued a statewide mask mandate last year.

Getting the General Assembly involved is something the Governor very much did not want to do. On July 10, 2020, Mr Beshear stated that he wouldn’t involve the legislature because he believed that they wouldn’t do his bidding.

    Beshear was asked at Friday’s news conference on COVID-19 why he has not included the legislature in coming up with his orders. He said many state lawmakers refuse to wear masks and noted that 26 legislators in Mississippi have tested positive for the virus.

And, as it happens, Kentucky’s legislators are not wearing masks today, as the special session opens:

    Kentucky special session on COVID-19 starts with many lawmakers not wearing masks

    By Jack Brammer | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 5:12 PM EDT

    With most members not wearing masks, a special session of the Kentucky General Assembly started Tuesday morning to deal with the state’s surging COVID-19 pandemic.

    Lawmakers acted quickly on Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s call to extend the COVID-19 state of emergency that has been in place in Kentucky since March 2020 and more time for a state of emergency to deal with August flooding in Nicholas County. House Joint Resolution 1, which extends the states of emergency and many of the governor’s emergency orders, was expected to clear the legislature before the end of the day.

    House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, gaveled his chamber into session at 10:13 a.m. and 94 of the 100 members responded to the roll call and heard the proclamation of the special session. Thirty-four members of the 38-member Senate convened at 12:16 p.m. with most members going without a mask. The two physicians in the Senate — Ralph Alvarado, R-Winchester, and Karen Berg, D-Louisville — wore masks.

    Lawmakers returned to the state Capitol in Frankfort at the call of Beshear, who has presented them with an agenda to fight the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 7,900 lives in Kentucky.

    The Democratic governor made the session call Saturday, two weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court said his emergency orders dealing with the pandemic needed approval by the Republican-led legislature.

As far as I have heard, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd has not yet lifted his injunctions against the legislation that the state Supreme Court ordered him to do, and the parties to the lawsuit were supposed to appear before the judge today, but I have been unable to find any reports concerning that. Nevertheless, Governor Beshear at least appears to be acting as though those injunctions have been lifted.

The legislature quickly approved the Governor’s request to extend the state of emergency until January 15th, the state House of Representatives voting 92-3 in favor, and the state Senate 32-4, sending it to Mr Beshear for his signature.

By extending the state of emergency until January 15th, when the General Assembly will be in its regular session, the Governor would have the power to issue a statewide mask mandate, lasting for thirty days, but the General Assembly might just deny him that one:

    Bill ditching mask mandates for KY schools and daycare centers gains momentum

    By Valarie Honeycutt Spears | Updated: September 7, 2021 | 4:32 PM EDT

    Hours after the Kentucky General Assembly began a special session Tuesday to deal with COVID-19 policies, the Senate Education Committee approved a bill that rejects the Beshear Administration’s emergency regulations requiring universal masking of people age two or older in K-12 schools and daycare centers.

    Senate Bill 1 declares the regulations requiring masks in schools and daycare centers null and void.

    The bill, approved by the committee with a 8-5 vote, now goes to the full Senate. Lawmakers who voted no voiced concerns about lifting the mask mandates at a time when transmission of COVID-19 and resulting hospitalizations are at an all-time high in Kentucky.

    Education Committee Chairman Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, said individual school boards will be free to decide their own policies about masking in schools.

    Wise said the bill would become law as soon as Gov. Andy Beshear signs it or the legislature overrides his veto, given that it is considered emergency legislation.

We had previously noted that the Governor had asked school districts to put mask mandates in place, but most districts made them optional. The Governor then got pissed off, and made it an order.

There’s more at the original, much of it devoted to the legislature’s plans to ease the restrictions on ‘non-traditional instruction,’ meaning those days in which school is conducted remotely. The legislature wants to keep schools from closing down for everybody because some students or staffers test positive for COVID-19.

Those were the two things which rankled the legislators, and Kentuckians in general, the most: the mask mandate and the schools being closed, and those are the two things the General Assembly appears to be most eager to prevent from happening again. Of course, it’s going to take a few days to see how this will play out, and what the legislature passes. But at least a wannabe dictator of a Governor has been reined in by the democratically elected General Assembly and the Kentucky Supreme Court.

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So much for Andy Beshear asking When people don't do what he asks, he responds by issuing orders

Two stories from the Lexington Herald-Leader, both dated today:

    Most Kentucky schools are making masks optional, even as COVID-19 surges. Here’s why.

    By Alex Acquisto | August 10, 2021 | 12:48 PM

    In a cramped room with members of the Harlan County Public Schools Board of Education, Darla Heflin steadied herself behind a microphone.

    “I’ll be very quick,” Heflin told the listening board and Superintendent Brent Roark on July 27. “We do believe that masks pose physical, mental and emotional distress on our students and on our children.”

    Heflin explained that her son, a rising eighth-grader, asked to be picked up from school twice last year because wearing a mask plagued him with headaches, dizziness and nausea. “He’s not used to wearing them,” she said. “We don’t make him wear them outside of school. I’m here believing that you all will vote to make them optional. We do not want masks to be mandatory for our students.” Continue reading →

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More discrimination against Asians by the left

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1

We have previously noted the apparently acceptable racial discrimination against Asians in the United States, and how white liberals not think that black and Hispanic students “have what it takes to compete on merit,” but they dismiss the achievements of students of Asian ethnicity as “white adjacent.”

From The Wall Street Journal:

    The Revolt of the Unwoke

    Three progressive San Francisco school board members are targeted for a recall.

    By William McGurn | July 26, 2021 | 6:26 PM EDT

    If the land of woke has a capital, it’s San Francisco. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that the City by the Bay has now become ground zero for a revolt by unwoke moms and dads.

Continue reading →

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Socialism in education

Despite Thomas Jefferson’s soaring words in the Declaration of Independence, all men are not created equal. Some are taller than others, and greater height confers many advantages in life. Some are better-looking than others; we all know that better-looking people have advantages in life. Some are physically stronger, some are faster or quicker, some more athletic, and some more intelligent.

These things matter, and they most certainly matter in school.

If you happen to be one of the smarter ones, you will remember those times in school where your teacher had taught something, you got it, and then he taught the same thing again, because not everyone learned it the first time through. Since we want to believe that almost anyone can earn his high school diploma, teachers are expected to keep teaching the points necessary until everyone gets it. This, to put it bluntly, sets the education pace at the rate at which the dumber students learn.

Of course, educators know this, and have been addressing it for many years; these days they are called ‘honors programs,’ in which the smarter students have the opportunity to take classes in which the ‘slower learners’ are left out.

Vancouver School Board cuts honours programs

School board says honours programs create inequities between students

CBC News · Posted: June 16, 2021 6:07 PM PT

The Vancouver School Board is cutting honours programs for secondary school students effective this fall.

Honours math and science will be cut, and honours English has already been discontinued.

Eric Hamber secondary and Magee secondary are the last two schools to offer honours math and science, as conversations about cancelling honours programs began more than five years ago.

In an emailed statement to CBC News, a school board spokesperson said honours courses create inequities for students.

“By phasing out these courses, all students will have access to an inclusive model of education, and all students will be able to participate in the curriculum fulsomely,” the statement reads.

Fulsomely, huh? The Cambridge Dictionary defines fulsomely as “in a way that expresses a lot of admiration or praise for someone, often too much, in a way that does not sound sincere.” The Merriam-Webster gives a definition which allows, in some cases, it not to have a snarky intent, and, given the nature of the author, perhaps it wasn’t meant to be insincere, but I can see, in the evil corner of my mind, the school board not meaning it that way, but which ever individual who wrote it did.

When I read this, my mind went immediately to the notion of the ‘progressives’ when it comes to socialism. To the left, socialism means that everyone will be treated, and rewarded, equally, and that we will all have a sort of upper-middle class lifestyle. There will be no billionaires, but there will also be no poor.

Except, of course, several countries have already tried some forms of socialism: Venezuela, North Korea, the old Soviet Union, the eastern European nations under Soviet sway, and China.

What actually happened was that there were a few wealthy and powerful people, but the great mass of the population suffered through poverty and scarcity. The population were, generally speaking, more economically equal, but what they were was equally poor.

This is what the Vancouver School Board is doing. They can’t make the slower learners catch up to the smarter students, but they can hold back the smarter students to the pace of the slower ones. That, I guess, is real ‘social justice.’

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Apparently it’s racist not to hire a ‘professor’ to teach racism.

We have previously mentioned the train wreck known as Teen Vogue. If you click on an article, you’ll now get a blurb, saying “Politics, the Teen Vogue way,” which makes me ask: weren’t Vogue and Teen Vogue supposed to be about fashion and makeup? You can check out this story to get a clue about the intellectual heft of Teen Vogue.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

This op-ed argues that university boards are really in control of many core functions on college and university campuses.

By Asheesh Kapur Siddique[1]Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst. | May 19, 2021

Do American universities lack ideological diversity? Are they bastions of left-wing thought and hostile to conservatives? In early April, the Crimson, the student newspaper of Harvard University, published an article asserting that the university’s conservative faculty are “an endangered species,” which quickly animated establishment concerns about the alleged lack of ideological diversity on American college campuses. But the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus,[2]Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics. nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

Faculty once had meaningful power within higher educational institutions. In 1915, faculty at American universities organized themselves into the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which championed academic freedom and significant faculty participation in the administration of appointments, peer reviews, and curriculum — a principle that came to be known as “shared governance.” Though it was resisted by administrators and boards of trustees for much of the early 20th century, the shared governance model was cemented within the modern university in the post-World War II era. This was especially apparent in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, issued jointly by the American Council on Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the AAUP, which specified that faculty, administrators, and boards of trustees formed a “community of interest” that should share responsibilities to produce well-governed institutions.

But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique, from his UMASS Amherst page.

There’s more at the original, but you can tell that Dr Siddique is a loony leftist when, on his personal website, that his “preferred gender pronouns are he / him / his / himself.”

Dr Siddique is so very concerned that colleges and universities, though the teaching staff are filled with liberals, are normally governed by boards of trustees, and those trustees are frequently representatives of the business, financial and legal communities. He doesn’t seem to understand: the boards of trustees aren’t there to teach, but to keep the school running. That means seeking donations and strong financial management.

The corporate capitalist regime that controls American university boards today has manufactured the current crisis of higher education by inflating tuition to compensate for state funding cuts while passing on the debt to students; hiring contingent rather than tenure-line staff to pay teachers less while withholding the security of academic freedom; and appointing administrators who are ultimately accountable to the regime.

Well, yes, of course: these are things necessary to keep colleges running. But Dr Siddique’s biggest complain is the one he put in parentheses, as though it was some kind of aside:

Case in point: The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees recently declined to appoint Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to a tenure-track position following conservative outcry over her work on the 1619 project, documenting the history of slavery in the U.S. As one board member told NC Policy Watch, “This is a very political thing. …There have been people writing letters and making calls, for and against. But I will leave it to you which is carrying more weight.”

Let’s be honest here: Mrs Hannah-Jones does not have her doctorate, normally a requirement for a tenure-track position. More, he scholarship in writing her 1619 Project has been seriously questioned:

In the fall of 2019 the World Socialist Web Site interviewed four leading historians who had major problems with the 1619 Project. This included the leading historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Brown University’s Gordon Wood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the American Revolution, “couldn’t believe” that Hannah-Jones had argued that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery.[49] Princeton’s James M. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for work on the Civil War, stated that he was “disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery.”[50]

It’s a rather amusing take to think that the people of Massachusetts, who did not keep slaves, would have been the primary instigators of the American Revolution to protect slavery.[3]There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders. More, slavery was perfectly legal in the British Empire, with the slave trade encouraged. Great Britain did not abolish slavery until 1833, more than half a century after our Revolution began, and our independence was won.

Is it any particular wonder that the University of North Carolina declined to award her a tenure-track position? UNC is like any major state university; it depends in part on alumni and supporter donations. Perhaps the Board of Trustees didn’t think it would be particularly helpful to alienate potential and continuing donors to have a tenure-track professor telling them how racist they were, or to have a faculty pushing the critical race theory.

References

References
↑1 Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst.
↑2 Actually, there are plenty of people who believe that there is racism in the teaching of mathematics.
↑3 There were a few, with the emphasis on ‘few,’ New Englanders who benefitted from the slave trade, in that some of the slave ships were owned by New Englanders.