Tag Archives: #Education

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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.
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Majority white schools reopening faster than in heavily minority districts

This, to me, is not a surprise. The public school teachers’ unions are strongest in our largest cities, the teachers’ unions just love ‘remote’ education, where they don’t have to deal with unruly students and some can ever ‘teach’ from home, and it is in our major urban areas where public school populations are more heavily minority. From The Wall Street Journal:

School Districts With Majority of Black or Hispanic Students Less Likely to Provide In-Person Instruction, Research Shows

By Jennifer Calfas

School districts with a majority of white students are more likely to be offering in-person instruction options than those with a majority of Black or Hispanic students, according to new research released Wednesday.

I tend to pay outsized attention to foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, where The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week “Philly schools to distribute computers to students as coronavirus could force closure for the rest of the school year“.

The Philadelphia School District is planning to distribute computers to children who lack them, and aims to put a new distance learning plan in place by the second week of April, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said Tuesday.

“We’re going to get the technology out to any child that says they need the technology,” Hite said at a news conference.

The news came as advocates called on the state to require districts to provide education for all students, including English-language learners and children with disabilities, during coronavirus-outbreak shutdowns.

Pennsylvania schools are now closed through April 6. Learning has been optional in Philadelphia — school system officials had made online resources available to students, as well as paper packets, but because of state concerns that all kids have access to technology, no assignment could be graded or made mandatory.

The demographic breakdown is that Philly’s public schools are 48.08% black, 22.77% Hispanic, 14.31% white, 9.11% Asian, and 5.45% multi-racial. The city’s public ‘charter’ schools are more heavily black, 59.55%.

Of course, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers have been fighting return to school plans all winter and spring. Outside of Philadelphia, WHYY reported, on January 7, 2021, that “many schools have been open for weeks or months despite substantial community transmission.”

Back to the Journal:

The findings from the American Enterprise Institute and the College Crisis Initiative of Davidson College, which are tracking reopening plans across 8,600 school districts, show how reopening decisions are affecting children and communities differently and exacerbating disparities for students of color.

Three percent of school districts with a majority of white students were operating on fully remote schedules, compared with 24% of school districts with a majority of Hispanic students and 18% of districts with a majority of Black students, based on districts’ plans as of March 22. Seven percent of all school districts tracked by these organizations offered remote-only instruction, according to the findings.

About 10% of Black students and 20% of Hispanic students overall attended school districts with remote-only options, compared with 5% of white students.

The new findings, which are tracked and updated weekly based on changes announced on school district’s websites, echo similar disparities cited in surveys and studies from organizations, media outlets and the U.S. Department of Education over the past year. About 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 of the school districts tracked in the new research have a majority of Hispanic and Black students, respectively. About half of the districts have a majority of white students, said Nat Malkus, a resident scholar and deputy director for education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Let’s tell the truth here: private schools have been doing everything they can to reopen for in-person classes, and private school populations are heavily white. Roughly 69% of private school students are white, though non-Hispanic whites make up only about 51% of school-aged children enrolled in schools. So, when The Wall Street Journal reports that public school districts have been reopening faster in white-majority districts, the newspaper is actually undercounting the return of white students to the classroom.

As always, there’s more at the original, but one thing is clear: in majority white areas, the very liberal teachers’ unions are more in tune with the people and parents in their districts, and non-Hispanic white students have been getting back into the classroom faster than those ‘BIPOC’ students the left claim to serve.[1]BIPOC stands for ‘black, indigenous, and people of color.

References

References
↑1 BIPOC stands for ‘black, indigenous, and people of color.
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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.