Category: Education & Schools

Let’s just be blunt about this.
This ‘teacher’ realizes that many black students – for whatever reasons, poor primary schooling/cultural rejection of ‘whitey education’/what have you – aren’t able to keep up with high school level math/algebra/geometry and instead of working on fixing the reasons that cause this, wants to provide an excuse. This lets the education system ‘off the hook’ for its failure and reinforces the notion that black ‘culture’ need not be educated but can rely on welfare to live on.

Oregon promotes teacher program that seeks to undo ‘racism in mathematics’
A toolkit includes a list of ways ‘white supremacy culture’ allegedly ‘infiltrates math classrooms’

The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,'” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

Continue reading “”

BLUF:
My tax dollars have paid for this.

Of course, it was only months ago that days of devastating riots took place in Minneapolis, just a few miles from the schools these districts administer. Those riots were infinitely more destructive than the one last week in Washington, but they drew no analogous response from the public schools–certainly not one that criticized the mayor, city council and governor who tolerated and even encouraged rioting and lawlessness. But that’s different: they are Democrats.

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WEIGH IN

America’s public schools are owned lock, stock and barrel by the Democratic Party, so it is no surprise that they are now echoing their party’s line on last week’s events. I have seen several partisan emails from school districts; this one comes from my own district:

Continue reading “”

Sending your children to public school is parental malpractice

Cops Threaten To Arrest Mom Who Wouldn’t Show ID When She Picks Her Kids Up From School
“I pulled the kids and I’m homeschooling.”

You may recall the saga of the South Carolina mom who granted her kids—ages 9, 10, and 11—permission to walk the mile home together, without her.

School officials refused to let them to do this, on the grounds that a nearby intersection (with walk/don’t walk signals) is too dangerous. This particular mom’s kids happen to cross it at other times, unaccompanied, on their way to and from extracurriculars.

Has the school never heard of crossing guards? No matter. The children were required to be picked up by an approved adult. If not, they would have to take the school bus.

The mom, Jessie Thompson, didn’t understand why it was up to the school to decide what her kids did after leaving school property. She offered to sign a liability waiver. This did not move the needle and the issue came to a head this past week. Continue reading “”

Now They Are Coming After the Pioneers

The public display of “woke” sensitivity is certainly contagious, and this virus has infected all levels of academic and corporate worlds. There are no issues too trivial to be affected, including team mascots and logos. Marietta College, a small liberal arts college in Ohio, has recently announced to its alumni that the College’s Pioneer mascot and logo are “under review” in light of “recent events.” This “review” is a symptom of a much larger story.

It is not too difficult to figure out just what are these “recent events,” as manifested by the current war on the name Redskins and on the monuments that include those of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The name Pioneers may soon join the forbidden ranks of Redskins. Apparently, any respect for those of European ancestry who first ventured into the Ohio River valley may now be unacceptable for a college that once proudly referred to itself as the Pioneers.

In and of themselves, any team’s nickname, logo, and mascot, are not very important. Who really cares if the team is called the Pioneers or whatever? Unfortunately, this proposed “review” by the College has a much broader, nationwide context, and is being driven by those who would radically transform and thereby diminish American society.

Stalin may have been a crude mass murderer, but he was cunningly perceptive. He recognized that an important element for the domination of the present is the control of the past. A ruler simply rewrites the past as necessary, airbrushes the pictures, turns persons into non-persons, all in a manner that justifies the agenda, no matter what or how brutal. This is an especially useful tactic if you accept the fantasy that history is necessarily progressive, and that there is “a right side of history” as Barak Obama used to assert.

The American Left has learned Stalin’s tactic well. Delegitimize the American past as incurably evil, convince people that there was nothing admirable in American system, fill the textbooks and lectures with the pathological dishonesty of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and any defense of contemporary American institutions and practices becomes next to impossible for those who don’t know better. Continue reading “”

Nothing earthshattering about this.
Our education indoctrination system at work, producing generations of stupid people.
I really like where the coed was asked – @ 2:42  – who would define it and she basically says ‘the goobermint’. You can see that she is in some manner aware of the utter irony of that and it makes her question her own statement.

Students call for national hate speech law…but can’t define ‘hate speech.’

I’d question if it actually is ‘relevant’.

It’s relevant, but is it really math?

Math teachers are asking students to analyze social-justice issues to make math relevant and compelling, reports Catherine Gewertz in Education Week. “Teachers are drawing on high-profile issues such as policing patterns, the spread of the pandemic, and campaign finance to explore math concepts from place value to proportionality and algebraic functions.”

In a social-justice math lesson, students may be asked to analyze data on the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

A new book with equity-based lessons for high school math teachers has become a bestseller.

Some districts are looking at teaching math through a “social-justice lens,” writes Gewertz. “The Seattle school district developed a framework last year that weaves questions of power and oppression into math instruction, along with explorations of ethnic identity, but it hasn’t been adopted.”

Detractors called the Seattle plan “woke math.” It wasn’t a compliment. Continue reading “”

I AM STRONG, I AM INVINCIBLE. I AM WOMAAAN!!!!
No! NO! NO!! Boys have cooooties!!!!!

Comment o’ the Day:
They’re actually doing men in fraternities an inadvertent favor, since due process does not exist for males accused of sexual wrongdoing. Especially at Duke, where 88 professors joined The New York Times, Nancy Grace and Dan Abrams in proclaiming the Duke Lacrosse Team members guilty of rape in advance of any trial.

Men should NEVER have any sort of personal or romantic relationships with female coworkers or fellow students. If women don’t like that, they can address their complaints to feminism.

Duke sorority council bans events with male groups.

The Panhellenic Council at Duke University voted to ban chapters of member sororities from hosting “mixers” with all-male organizations, vowing to place chapters that violate the rule on social probation.

The Duke Panhellenic Association “unites women across 10 chapters” of various sororities and is the “largest unified body of undergraduate women at Duke University.”

According to a post on the Duke Panhellenic Association’s Instagram page, the Panhellenic Council voted to ban mixers with all-male organizations to focus on women’s empowerment. The post states that all-male organizations cause concern amongst other groups due to gender dynamics and the objectification of women.

The post defines mixers as “exclusive events between organizations.” Continue reading “”

Ohio Senate Approves Armed School Staff Legislation

There are already dozens of school districts across the state of Ohio that have armed school staff in place, but a lawsuit filed with the help of Everytown for Gun Safety is putting the legality of thousands of vetted and trained school staff in jeopardy. Parents in the Madison school district argue that under Ohio law, teachers and staff need to have the exact same training as police officers before they can legally carry, and the issue is currently before the state Supreme Court.

Lawmakers in the Buckeye State aren’t waiting for the court to decide if the current statutes allow for districts to determine their own training policies for armed school staff. On Wednesday, the state Senate approved legislation that specifically authorizes school staffers to carry without going through hundreds of hours of peace officer training.

State Sen. Bill Coley, a Butler County Republican sponsoring the bill, said the “court went off the reservation” with its ruling. The legislation, he said, would ensure that “school districts in my area of the state can have the same rights that all of your school districts in your areas of the state have.”

Gun-rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, have expressed support for SB 317, arguing local education officials should be allowed to determine the best policies for ensuring their schools are safe. The Madison Local School District put its policy in place after a 14-year-old student opened fire at Madison Junior-Senior High School in 2016, injuring four.

Several Democratic senators spoke against the legislation prior to the bill’s passage in the GOP-dominated Senate. They argued that the bill is unwanted by most Ohioans and makes schools less safe.

“No child in Ohio should have to worry about if there is a gun at school, or if the person with the gun has had proper training,” said state Sen. Hearcel Craig, a Columbus Democrat.

First off, no teacher or staff member in Ohio is carrying without first volunteering, being vetted, and then undergoing several days of training, typically through the Ohio FASTER program, which focuses specifically on stopping armed threats at school. Educators not only learn how to respond to an attack with their lawfully-carried firearm, but they learn de-escalation techniques, first aid, and other strategies to deal with an active assailant and the aftermath. Continue reading “”

Was That A Toy Gun In Your Living Room?

How bad has the anti-gun hysteria gotten among some in our educational system? So bad that a grade-school student from Colorado Springs, Colo., was recently suspended for having a toy gun—in his own home!

Isaiah Elliott, who is 12 years old, was home last August participating in an online class. His school was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Isaiah was sitting on his living room couch with his laptop computer. He was next to a friend who was also doing online class work with a different teacher. During his second-period class, Isaiah’s art teacher noticed the friend was holding a “gun” and asked Isaiah to move it off screen.

Isaiah then took the green toy pistol—which had the words “ZOMBIE HUNTER” emblazoned on one side—from his friend and placed it out of the teacher’s sight.

Afterwards, the art teacher informed her superior that a student had what looked like a gun. The school official called the police.

“They said they called the police for my son’s safety,” said Dani Elliott, Isaiah’s mother. “But, if they were so concerned about him and if they really thought his life might be threatened, why didn’t they call me immediately? And why did the police take four-and-a-half hours to get to our house?”

As was widely reported by local and national news media, Widefield School District 3, Isaiah’s school district at the time of this incident, repeated its “student-safety” mantra to explain the school’s reaction. The district also claimed Isaiah had violated school policy by bringing a “facsimile” firearm to school. Because of this, he was suspended for five days.

“But he was not at school,” said Elliott. “He was in our living room. Apparently, they have the right to dictate what goes on in our own home, over a Nerf gun no less!”

Elliott did receive an email from the school about an hour after the incident. She called the school and told them it was a toy gun. Bodycam footage (available on the internet) shows an El Paso County Sheriff’s office deputy at the school to take the complaint from school staff. The video shows one staffer admitting it was most likely a toy gun as they laughed over the incident.

“It really scared Isaiah when the deputy sheriff showed up,” said Elliott. “And I believe the school suspended my son to save face, to pretend they actually had some policy in place to cover this. They don’t. It’s our home, not the school building.”

Elliott soon pulled Isaiah out of the Widefield School District 3 and put him into a new school. Continue reading “”

Biden Wants to Prevent Armed Teachers From Protecting Themselves and Their Students

Preventing teachers from carrying firearms is just one of Joe Biden’s gun control goals. See his other priorities for rolling back Second Amendment rights here.

The idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings burst into the national conversation after Parkland, when President Trump raised the possibility in listening sessions with grieving parents. Shortly after the 2018 shooting at the Florida high school, he told attendees at the 2018 CPAC that as many as one out of every five teachers should be carrying a gun.

It provoked an uproar. But often lost in the bluster of that moment was the reality that teachers had already been carrying guns in U.S. schools for over 10 years. Trump had just become the policy’s highest-profile advocate yet. The first serious proposals to arm teachers cropped up after the Columbine shooting in 1999, and the first school district to announce such a policy was in Harrod, Texas, in 2008, after Virginia Tech.

The decision to let schools arm teachers is left to state governments. Since the 1990s, 19 states have passed laws and created programs to arm some teachers and other school staff, like principals or superintendents. In 24 states, school boards have the discretion to authorize anyone of their choosing to carry a gun on campus. A 2019 investigation by VICE News found that in the year after Parkland, the number of school districts arming their teachers more than doubled, from around 215 school districts to nearly 500, encompassing hundreds of thousands of students.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he strongly opposes arming teachers, but because it’s up to state legislatures—which stayed resoundingly Republican this election, including in armed-teacher states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah—it’s a policy that may be here to stay.

– Jen Kinney in Biden Hates the Idea of Arming Teachers, But It’s Way Too Late to Stop It

This is how freedom fails. When parents let their children get their heads filled with the mush of marxist professors let loose in our schools, colleges and universities.
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”—Ronald Reagan

Kids today: 4 in 10 call Constitution ‘outdated,’ OK with silencing speech.

Free speech, support for the Constitution, and even having a variety of friends are taking a hit on America’s campuses as college undergraduates appear to be adopting a “my way or the highway” attitude.

A new survey of campuses developing the nation’s future leaders shows an antagonistic approach by students to views they don’t agree with. And worse, a majority feel that they can’t express a view different from those of their professors.

The survey for Yale University’s William F. Buckley Program, provided to Secrets, is the latest to show the fading of thought diversity on campuses and shrinking support for the First Amendment and the Constitution overall. Continue reading “”

Yeah, socialism sounds real nice, that is until you find out how much it really costs. The real question is whether or not these kids can overcome their college indoctrination.

Campus Reform recently asked students at Virginia Tech if they support Medicare for All.
Most students agreed with the plan, but were reluctant to donate their own money to the cause.

H-O-M-E-S-C-H-O-O-L !
“Just do it”

WHAT OUR CHILDREN LEARN IN SCHOOL

Our public schools are run, for the most part, by liberal administrators, and teachers are drawn, usually, from the lowest quadrant of academic ability among college graduates. There are exceptions, of course, but the overall level of instruction in the public schools is abysmal. And that isn’t the worst of it: teachers who are marginally able, at best, to teach the subjects for which they are nominally responsible often devote themselves to political indoctrination instead.

Most such forays into left-wing mythology go unreported, but occasionally an enterprising kid turns on his phone and records a teacher’s rant. That happened a few weeks ago in a 9th grade Geography class in a suburban Twin Cities high school:


The teacher’s ignorance is cosmic: 1) There is no “Speaker of the Senate.” 2) McConnell didn’t say there wasn’t enough time to confirm Merrick Garland. 3) The idea that “life in America is gonna change radically” if there is a conservative majority on the Supreme Court is a fantasy. 4) “This is an opinion of the court”? Sheer incoherence. 5) “Conservatives believe that corporations should be considered humans and should have rights.” Stupid beyond belief. No one has ever said that a corporation is a human, nor has anyone ever denied that corporations have rights. This is why, for example, President Trump can’t shut down CNN and the New York Times. Tempting though it may be.

In this particular case, the kid’s parents are fighting back and taking the teacher’s incompetent and inappropriate conduct to the local school board. But this kind of thing goes on every day, in thousands of classrooms across the country. Almost never are there consequences.

A colleague of mine had an idea that I think has merit. She thinks that if parents knew this kind of political indoctrination is going on, teachers would stop, or at least scale back. Thus, every classroom should be streamed online, and parents of kids in every class should be given access to the stream. At any moment, a parent could check in and see exactly what is going on in his son’s or daughter’s classroom. This is much like the manner in which parents use cameras in their homes to keep tabs on what babysitters are up to. Given the quality of instruction in our public schools, the analogy is almost perfect.

Mathematics Association Declares Math is Racist

The Mathematical Association of America released a statement Friday claiming both that mathematicians should engage in “uncomfortable conversations” about race, and that policies of from the Trump administration, like the lack of a mask mandate in the United States, are somehow an affront to mathematics. The group concludes with a call for a “pursuit of justice” within math.

“Thanks to science and mathematics, we understand now that masks, social distancing, frequent, rapid, mass testing, and contact tracing are all fundamental to keep our communities safer during the COVID-19 pandemic, ” the association wrote.

Continue reading “”

Yeah, and I wonder what those 17% would think if their own rules were used to give them a swift kick in the posterior.
Do you think they’d reconsider then?

17% of Students Say Violence is Sometimes Acceptable to Censor Speakers They Disagree With

At least before lockdowns started, there was an increasing trend of students using social media to organize the physical blocking of speakers who they disagreed with from attending events on campus.

The results of a new survey has now revealed shocking revelations about what US college students think about violence as a way to shut down speech. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Real Clear Education, and College Pulse conducted a survey across 55 colleges across the US and asked 20,000 students about free speech issues in their campuses.

Surprisingly, almost one out of five students that have taken the survey were fine with deploying violence for shutting down someone’s speech in cases where they disagreed with the speaker.

They were also questioned if blocking people from attending events was acceptable.

“While 57% of students say their college would defend a speaker’s right to express his or her views in the case of a controversy over ‘offensive’ expression, a disturbingly large minority, 42%, believe their college would punish the speaker for making the statement.”

The survey revealed that nearly 20 percent of students were okay with violence to shut down speech and stop an event. Going deeper into the details reveals that one percent of the students are under the impression that “violence” is acceptable in all cases, with three percent saying that violence is acceptable in some cases, and thirteen percent saying that violence can be acceptable in rare cases only.

Summing it up makes it clear that 17 percent of students endorse violence in at least some cases to shut down speech. Moreover, the concept of free speech in students is influenced by their political ideology.

“Students’ assessment of free speech on campus is, at least in part, driven by their political ideology, and whether or not they align with the majority viewpoint at their college.

The author of the book wants free college which means he wants the old marxist canard of ‘equality of outcome’ which results in nothing more than  the ‘lowest common denominator’ i.e. stupid printed on all diplomas in invisible ink.

A Book with a Kernel of Truth—and a Grain Silo of Nonsense

Every so often, a leftist thinker breaks free from the orthodoxy to point out that policies favored by “progressives” can have adverse consequences. When that happens, it’s worth paying attention.

We have such an instance with the publication of The Cult of Smart by Fredrik deBoer, a writer and one-time academic whose work has appeared in leftist publications such as The New Republic and Jacobin.

He proudly proclaims his Marxism, saying that what all good Marxists want is a better, more equitable world. While he sees a lot to complain about—America still allows capitalism, after all—his particular target in the book is the way our education system overemphasizes academic credentials. We excessively reward those who are good at getting them at the expense of people who lack academic ability. Continue reading “”

My generation is being raised to hate America — it’s time to stand up for our history.
You can’t love what you don’t know. When young Americans say they aren’t proud of their country, it proves our education system has failed them.

I gathered with the entire student body of Wyoming Catholic College on Sept. 17, 2019, for a mandatory celebration of Constitution Day. We began with the Pledge of Allegiance, witnessed a lively panel discussion between professors on the history and modern relevance of America’s founding principles, and concluded by singing patriotic songs.

If you are a student at a typical American university, that description probably sounds foreign to anything you have experienced. Anti-Americanism has spread across college campuses like a wildfire, igniting rage and resentment against anything perceived as oppressive — even the American flag. As a result, most universities would likely shy away from a celebration of our nation’s founding in favor of more “inclusive” events.

And that’s why university officials have been among the first to lash out at President Donald Trump’s still vague calls for “patriotic education” in our schools.

Ashamed of America?
In a Gallup poll this June, only 63% of U.S. adults say they are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” to be American, the lowest level of patriotism ever recorded since Gallup first asked the question in 2001. Among members of my generation, the youngest surveyed, patriots are in the minority. Only 4 out of 10 respondents ages 18-34 claim to be extremely or very proud of being American. Continue reading “”

It’s not just teaching in American history that is lacking in schools today.
It’s World history is as well

Keep in mind these are the top graduates of the state’s public high schools.
If these represent the top, think about what the rest must be like.

Trump Announces Executive Order Establishing ‘1776 Commission’ To Combat ‘1619 Project’

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday he would sign a new executive order establishing the “1776 Commission” to promote patriotic education. The commission will counter the revisionist history peddled by leftist efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which imposes false narratives on America’s students.

“The narratives about America being pushed by the far left and being chanted in the streets bear a striking resemblance to the anti-American propaganda of our adversaries,” Trump said in remarks during the White House Conference on American History at the National Archives. He further described the 1619 Project—a collection of essays that cast America as an irredeemably racist empire built solely to oppress minorities—as “ideological poison.”

Earlier this year, China successfully weaponized American wokeness to drive divisions deeper in the U.S., seeking to evade responsibility for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak by complaining that any term linking the virus to its Chinese origins was racist. Woke reporters soon complied with Beijing’s orders and began badgering the president repeatedly on his use of terms consistent with the naming of new diseases.

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda,” Trump said, “that if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.” Continue reading “”