Category: Education & Schools

Consequences

So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 – who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them.

Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

While those educated in the most prestigious universities and colleges in our fair nation may not grasp the obvious double-standard, a fair number of the rest of us see it all very plainly. Indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of civilians by armed bullies is bad, m’kay? The Geneva Convention, that much-violated set of rules governing the conduct of war operations, frowns on it, for all that only a few nations conducting warfare lately have ever observed them. I am also certain that I am not the only one of the post-WWII generation who had those few brave individuals who sheltered European Jews, or helped them escape from the Nazis’ “Final Solution” held up to me as the epitome of moral courage in a dark time.

So, it emerges that has been considerable blow-back to the poisonous Jew-hate on display after the October 7th Pogrom – students and individual bigots being doxed, fired, or having offers of post-graduate employment rescinded, counter-protests in front of their houses, anonymous death threats (so alleged), and the threat of an internet mob harassing them. My heart bleeds for them… well, no, it doesn’t. Not a bit of it – all this has been established as the accepted treatment for conservatives, or the unwary innocent caught by the progressive cancel culture mob. Let it all unfold in the manner established by the progressive mob.

Georgia Lieutenant Gov Wants To Pay Teachers $10,000 Annually To Carry Guns On Campuses

Georgia Republican Lieutenant Gov. Burt Jones unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would annually pay school teachers $10,000 to carry a gun at school in an effort to increase safety on campuses.

“One of the most critical duties we have as public servants is to protect those who are most vulnerable – including all of Georgia’s children,” Jones said in a news release.

Jones said the legislation would use state funding to ensure Georgia’s school systems and teachers have the option to receive proper firearms training and certification. The plan also calls for stricter guidelines for existing school safety plans and to distribute more money to schools that hire school resource officers with police certification, The Associated Press reported.

“We feel like this is the best way to prepare faculty, but also prepare law enforcement and the system however we can,” Jones reportedly said at Austin Road Elementary School in Winder on Wednesday, adding the state should take more “proactive” measures to prevent school shootings.

Republican State Sens Max Burns and Clint Dixon joined the Lt. Gov. in crafting the 2024 legislative priority to increase school safety, contending that protecting children and their classrooms is their first responsibility.

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Oregon removes writing, reading, and math mastery from high school graduation requirements

The Oregon State Board of Education unanimously voted on Thursday to remove proof of mastery in reading, writing, and math in order to graduate from high school until 2029.

The board argued that requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or to create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for students of color, disabled students, or those learning English as a second language. The standardized tests will still be given but will not play a role in determining whether students receive their diplomas.

“We haven’t suspended any sort of assessments,” state board member Vicky Lopez Sanchez said during the board meeting. “The only thing we are suspending is the inappropriate use of how those assessments were being used. I think that really is in the best interest of Oregon students.”

Opponents of the new order argued that removing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. The opponents argued that helping students with low academic skills through extra instruction in writing and math has helped them. However, supporters claim that forcing students to spend extra time on schoolwork eliminates their opportunity to take an elective and does not translate to how they perform after graduation.

“We are unable to ethically make a different decision at this point. It is also unethical for us to continue to require this when we know it can continue to cause harm and has had no change in how students are performing,” Board of Education Chairwoman Guadalupe Martinez Zapata told ABC’s KATU-2.

Hundreds of state residents have filed public comments on the subject, and most are in favor of keeping the requirements. But mastery is not the only graduation requirement. Students also need to earn a certain amount of credits and create an education plan that helps them achieve their goals after high school.

The pause was initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when schools across the country were forced to shut down

Benjamin Buzek MBA ‘22 Earns the 2023 Sergeant Major Larry L. Strickland Educational Leadership Award from AUSA

Sergeant Major Benjamin Buzek MBA ‘22, a dedicated special operations non-commissioned officer, has been honored with the prestigious 2023 Sergeant Major Larry L. Strickland Educational Leadership Award for his remarkable contributions in creating educational avenues for non-commissioned officers (NCOs) within the U.S. Army. Sergeant Major of the Army Michael R. Weimer presented this distinguished award to Buzek during the award ceremony held at the Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C. on October 9.

When SGM Buzek earned his bachelor’s degree, he did so while balancing the demands of active service and parenthood. As he explored options to further his education and pursue an MBA, he wanted to do so without compromising his role as an active-duty soldier. Recognizing the need to expand educational horizons for enlisted personnel, he took it upon himself to pave a groundbreaking path in collaboration with William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business.

For years, the Major General James Wright MBA cohort at the Mason School of Business had been offered to active-duty officers through a partnership with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). However, a similar educational opportunity for active-duty NCOs was notably absent. Buzek worked through his chain of command to secure the necessary permissions, allowing him to enroll in the MBA program at the Mason School of Business, thereby setting a precedent for future NCOs.

SGM Buzek firmly believes that the ever-evolving nature of warfare demands a higher level of education for service members of all ranks, enabling them to make informed and strategic decisions in the heat of combat. He underscores the importance of having educated NCOs working alongside officers, as the modern battlefield operates at a rapid pace. “In today’s battlefield, the command team of officers and NCOs have to move at the speed of light because the enemy is moving that quickly,” emphasized Buzek. “So, I think it’s incredibly important that our force is educated, and our NCOs get the time to go to school.”

Since his graduation from William & Mary in August 2022, two other NCOs have successfully earned their MBA through Buzek’s innovative initiative. While the program presently has limited eligibility, SGM Buzek remains unwavering in his commitment to expand it further, ensuring this invaluable educational opportunity becomes accessible to more soldiers.

The Review That Motivates Me Every Day

I recognize that it is probably not healthy to be motivated by negative emotions, but almost every time I sit down to work on my book on American gun culture, I am motivated by a review of my book proposal by someone who works as a public librarian in the United States:

While the author is an excellent academic and writes very well, it remains impossible to recommend this work.
I can appreciate how the author is seeking to break new ground in this field, but I cannot think of a more irresponsible premise.
The United States had 40 mass-shootings by January 24th this year (more shootings than days of the year).
Additionally, the author ignores the consistent research which continues to prove that not only does gun ownership has [sic.] “zero evidence of protective effects,” but also increases the odds that one will be shot to death (this includes those not owning guns, but merely living with someone who does).
I mean no.
The views put forth here are repressible; built on the backs of the grade school children who continually forfeit their lives.

The “irresponsible premise,” of course, being that guns are normal and normal people use guns.

This way of seeing drives me every day to try to hold a different mirror up to the reality of guns and gun culture in America.

 

Assault victim sues Loudoun County Public Schools for $30 million.

The daughter of Scott Smith who was 15 at the time she was sexually assaulted by a boy in the girl’s bathroom has filed a lawsuit against the school system for $30 million.

A teenage girl who was sexually assaulted in a Virginia high school bathroom has sued Loudoun County Public Schools, alleging that school officials failed to heed warning signs about her attacker and responded to her May 2021 assault by trying to cover it up.

The teenager, who filed the lawsuit under the pseudonym “Jane Doe” along with her parents, was 15 years old when a younger, male student in a skirt assaulted her in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn on May 28, 2021.

The incident garnered national attention. Conservatives protested a policy in Loudoun County schools — put in place after the assault — that allowed transgender students to use bathrooms matching their gender identity. Meanwhile, outraged parents in Loudoun County questioned why the perpetrator was moved to a different school, where he assaulted a second female student months later.

The story is a lot more complicated than this simple summary can convey. The girl had previously had some kind of sexual encounter with the boy in question in a school bathroom. This rendezvous was also planned but the incident became aggressive and the girl wanted it to stop.

Also, while it’s true the trans bathroom policy wasn’t in place at the time, it’s also true that the day of the incident the first report back to the school board was that the assault might be connected to the forthcoming bathroom policy. In other words, the very things “conservatives” protested was also the first thing school officials were worried about.

The boy’s mother has since claimed he was not trans or non-binary but no one denies he was wearing a skirt to school that day. Former school superintendent Scott Ziegler told the NY Times in August that at a meeting on the day of the assault the school’s principal told him, “He runs with the drama crowd, and you know how the drama crowd can be. They’re attention-seeking. And he’s been experimenting with different looks.” So, yes, he wore skirts but “he has never come out to the school as either nonbinary or transgender.” More on the lawsuit.

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Teachers With Guns: District by District, a Push to Arm Educators Is Growing
Seconds matter during a school shooting. A rural superintendent wondered, what if staff members could intervene before police arrived?

An act of mass violence hasn’t yet touched the Benjamin Logan Local School District.

Superintendent John Scheu is thankful for that.

But for years, every time news broke about yet another school shooting, Scheu faced a handful of “what if?” questions.

What if a school in this small, rural district about an hour northwest of Columbus, Ohio—where the closest police outpost is 10 miles away—was the next target of a shooting? What if Benjamin Logan students were the next to have to huddle in closets sending “I love you” texts to friends and family? What if Scheu’s community was the next to have to mourn the loss of beloved students and staff members?

“If it can happen in all of these other places, it could happen here,” he said.

So, Scheu and his district invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in security. They hired school resource officers who are stationed at each of the district’s three schools. Security cameras send live feeds to the local sheriff’s office. Staff are reminded often that exterior doors are not to be propped open or left unlocked for any reason.

There’s a new mental health clinic at one of the schools, staffed with counselors trained to help the district’s roughly 1,600 students and 225 staff members.

District leaders felt confident they’d done all they could to keep outside threats from entering their buildings.

But what if the threat came from someone already inside?

Students and teachers have lockdown drills, and, as has become commonplace in American schools, they know to pull down the shades and lock the classroom doors before hiding quietly from a threat. But, beyond that, there isn’t much they would be able to do but “wait and hope that help would come,” Scheu said.

Except, Scheu asked himself, what if there were staff members trained to intervene? What if a handful of teachers, aides, and others could quickly reach for a firearm if an active shooter were targeting students?

“When you’re talking about putting out an active shooter threat, it’s a matter of seconds, not a matter of minutes,” said Scheu, who has served as superintendent in the district since July 2020. “And it’s a matter of life and death.”

After a year of planning, the district’s first “Armed Response Team” was in place to start the 2023-24 school year, part of a growing trend in Ohio and elsewhere in which schools tap teachers and other employees to act as the first line of armed defense against an active shooter.

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If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war.

Vanderbilt professor: Climate change stories ‘cater to the white consciousness.’

A professor of English at Vanderbilt University recently gave a talk about how the genre of climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” has a problem with “its intersection [of] race and genre.”

Teresa Goddu  whose advocacy led to the creation of Vanderbilt’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies minor, told an audience at the Novel Seminar Series that climate fiction in the United States “depicts the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis,” The Hustler reports.

Such stories “often represent white, mostly privileged characters in communities becoming destabilized if not undone by climate catastrophe,” Goddu said. “Climate punctures the bubble of safety and security that cocoons the white psyche.”

Goddu added that she is “tired” of the focus on whiteness in climate stories, or “texts that actually just reify whiteness.” As a result, she’s working on “encompassing slave and neo-slave narratives” into such tales to “expand the canon.”

“I really think a lot of climate fiction is being written, but not recognized as such, especially African American literature,” Goddu said. “I want to expand […] what is considered climate fiction and [redefine] what we are actually reading and paying attention to.”

Looking ahead, Goddu said she hopes her work will expand the genre and leverage optimism, satire and new tropes to innovate the body of work and reimagine a better, more sustainable future.

“I am more interested in reading stories that reimagine possible futures or teach me about the structures, historically and currently, that I live within,” Goddu said. “I don’t like literature as policy statements. I don’t like literature to be so instrumental.”

According to her faculty bio, Goddu’s research deals with “slavery and antislavery, race and American culture [and] genre studies.” In a 2021 interview, Goddu said she began “noticing how the antislavery movement was being invoked by climate activists as a model.”

“This led me to consider what social change my own moment demanded of me and how I might bring my gifts—as administrator, teacher, and writer—to bear on the issue,” she said. “It made sense to connect my long-standing concern with racial justice to the issue of climate justice and my interest in how literature can affect social change to the climate crisis.”

Seven years ago another Vanderbilt academic, Ed Rubin, offered a pair of courses on cli-fi: “Visions of the Future in Cli-Fi” and “Climate Change Literature: A New Fictional Genre about a Real Problem.” Many of the titles on his reading list (“Earth Abides,” “The Postman,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) are Euro/white-centric.

Academic Whose Work Was Cited As Proof Of ‘Systemic Racism’ Is Fired For Falsifying Research.

A Florida State University professor whose work was foundational to perpetuating the false narrative that there is widespread “systemic racism” infecting American society has been fired for falsifying data in his academic research on the subject.

In a recently resurfaced report from last month, the New York Post revealed that Eric Stewart, an FSU criminology professor, had been fired by the university “on account of ‘extreme negligence’ in his research,” as well as “incompetence” and producing “false results” in his nearly 20 years of work.

“I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy,” FSU Provost James Clark wrote in a July 13 letter formally notifying Stewart of his firing.

According to the Post, Stewart has had six studies published in major academic journals between 2003 and 2019 that were “fully retracted,” including a 2019 study claiming the historical legacy of lynchings “made whites perceive blacks as criminals, and that the problem was worse among conservatives.”

Stewart’s retracted research also included claims that racial disparities in criminal sentencing are racially motivated. In a 2015 study, for instance, Stewart suggested Americans supported tougher sentencing for Hispanics because they feared an increase in the U.S. Latino population and Latinos’ potential economic success.

Other retracted studies include a 2018 analysis which “suggested that white Americans view black and Latino people as ‘criminal threats,’ and suggested that perceived threat could lead to ‘state-sponsored social control,’” the Post added.

Clark indicated in his letter that Stewart’s other published works are “in doubt.”

Rather than own up to his actions, Stewart has since attempted to play the victim card and attacked Justin Pickett, a former FSU graduate student who reported Stewart for his unethical conduct. Following the launch of the investigation into his work in 2020, Stewart, who is black, claimed that by raising concerns about his faulty research, Pickett had “essentially lynched [him] and [his] academic character.”

In addition to his $190,000 annual salary at FSU, Stewart’s projects received millions in research grants from major groups and government agencies. According to the Post, the National Institute of Mental Health — which falls under the National Institute of Health — reportedly gave Stewart $3.2 million to research “how African Americans transition into adulthood.”

Stewart also reportedly received funds from the National Science Foundation, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, and the National Institute of Justice, a subsidiary of the Department of Justice.

The discovery of Stewart’s falsified research and his subsequent firing is significant to understanding the left’s ongoing war on American police officers. As noted by Wilfred Reilly, an associate professor at Kentucky State University, Stewart is “[p]robably THE academic [figure] responsible” for the debunked narrative that so-called “systemic racism” plagues U.S. police departments throughout the country.

According to Google Scholar, for instance, Stewart’s questionable — and in several cases, categorically false — works have garnered more than 8,500 citations by other researchers. Stewart’s “research” has been used as a pretext by other academics, regime-approved media, and Democrat politicians to smear America’s on-the-ground law enforcement officers as inherently “racist” towards non-white Americans.

“The point [of this story] is that one of the [main] guys who built up the entire narrative of ‘wokeness’ just made it up,” Reilly told The Federalist. “Throughout the entire kind of racial reckoning, one of the things that I and others … have noticed is that these stories [about police brutality against black Americans] keep collapsing. The narrative of police genocide of African Americans turned out … to be complete nonsense.”

Reilly also referenced research conducted by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, whose analyses of publicly available data have debunked leftists’ narrative that there is an epidemic of police killing unarmed black Americans. In a USA Today article published a few months after George Floyd’s death, for instance, Mac Donald noted how even data from The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings dispels such claims and predicted that “[r]educing police resources will ultimately result in poorer service to the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas.”

Mac Donald’s forecast ultimately came true. While the rise of Black Lives Matter and Democrat-generated attacks on police began under the Obama administration, it was Floyd’s death that ushered in a new era of the left’s war on America’s police. Democrat politicos and their legacy media allies quickly hijacked Floyd’s death to normalize street violence committed by their communist foot soldiers.

The left’s perpetuation of the false “systemic racism in policing” narrative and their subsequent actions not only killed people such as David Dorn, but countless others who suffered because their Democrat-run cities defunded local law enforcement.

Following Floyd’s death and the anti-police back it launched, there was a significant spike in overall murders, especially affecting black victims. According to Reilly, such statistics don’t interest groups like Black Lives Matter because “a focus on things that might actually correlate with a high loss of black life … [is] not what the movement was about.”

BLM “was about using outlier conflict between blacks and whites to get money,” Reilly said. “The whole idea was to take these very isolated, white cop or white vigilantes on black male cases and present them as normal. They did that for a while. It turned out not to be real and they’ve pulled back from the scene, now as the owners of some nice properties. And now we’re left to clean up the mess.”

Quote O’ The Day
If a foreign government had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war. – Glenn T. Seaborg

Math professors: Incoming students can’t even add fractions, subtract

Colleges add tutoring, remedial courses as freshmen struggle post-COVID lockdowns

Universities across the country are struggling to address incoming students’ poor math skills after many fell behind academically during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

More than ever before, professors say freshmen cannot answer basic high school mathematics problems such as subtracting a positive number from a negative number or adding two fractions, according to a recent report from the Associated Press.

“We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third,” Maria Emelianenko, chair of the George Mason University math department, told the Associated Press.

Emelianenko said new students’ math deficiencies have become such a “huge issue” that her northern Virginia university recently began a Math Boot Camp, and approximately 100 students chose to attend the week-long remedial program over the summer.

Other colleges and universities are seeing the same problem. Many first-year college students spent their 10th grade year – when algebra or geometry is typically taught – at home due to widespread, months-long lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools switched to virtual classrooms instead, but growing research indicates many students struggled with online learning and now lag behind academically.

At Temple University in Philadelphia, Professor Jessica Babcock told the AP she began noticing the problem last year when grading STEM major students’ tests in her intermediate algebra course:

The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six.

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.”

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400.

“It’s not just that they’re unprepared, they’re almost damaged,” said Brian Rider, Temple’s math chair. “I hate to use that term, but they’re so behind.”

Many universities are trying to be proactive, offering remedial summer programs, expanding tutoring services and providing more office hours with professors, according to AP. Math professors say they are thinking about new ways to teach the subject, too, including more hands-on, in-class instruction.

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Comment O’ The Day
Let’s call this what it is: The sex groomer Stasi.

BLUF
Make no mistake: This bill does involve training teachers to profile parents based on the likelihood that they may secretly harbor heresy against the transgender state religion

California Bills Headed to Newsom’s Desk Will Launch a Transgender Inquisition Targeting Parents.

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” might as well become the new slogan of the Golden State.

California’s Legislature has passed—or is about to pass—a slew of bills aimed at undermining the rights of parents (and potential foster parents) who disagree with the transgender worldview.

What would the state need to launch a transgender inquisition? It would need inquisitors to identify and hunt down parents who dared to dissent from gender ideology. It would need an apparatus to induct kids into its cult while keeping parents in the dark. It would need institutions to screen potential foster parents to block heretics from fostering or adopting kids who might convert to the state religion. Most importantly, it would need a legal way to pry kids from the arms of their apostate progenitors.

These legislative proposals foot that bill. One of them would train teachers to profile these hated “anti-LGBTQ” parents, another would train psychotherapists to prepare to hide gender “treatments” from parents at a minor’s request, a third would prevent school districts from removing sexually explicit books if they contain transgender themes, a fourth would prevent Californians from becoming foster parents if they dissent from gender ideology, and the fifth would expand the definition of child abuse to include “non-affirmation” of a child’s claimed transgender identity.

In a supreme Orwellian irony, each of these California bills claims to uphold the virtues of “diversity” and “inclusion,” while forcing down parents’ throats a constricting worldview at odds with reality and seeking to exclude moms and dads from raising their own children if they dare to disagree.

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Need more than one (1).

In Wake of Uvalde, Recently Passed Texas Statewide Mandate Means an Armed Security Officer in Every School

Texas lawmakers quietly passed a sweeping mandate for school safety measures, including a requirement to post an armed security officer at every school and provide mental health training for certain district employees.

Texas House Bill 3, which was signed into law June 14 by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, went into effect on Sept. 1, and comes in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in May 2022.

In the bill, each school district campus is required to armed security guard which includes: a school district peace officer; a school resource officer; a commissioned peace officer employee; a school marshal; or a school district employee who has completed school safety training and carries a handgun on their person on school premises.

HB00003I