Category: Education & Schools

Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading—that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.

Weaver and his co-petitioners—including civil rights, educational, and literacy groups—want schools to spend more time in the youngest grades teaching the sounds that make up words and the letters that represent those sounds. His petition is part of an enormous rethink of reading instruction that is sweeping the U.S. So far this year, five states have passed laws that require training for teachers in phonics-based reading techniques, adding to the 13 that passed such laws last year. And in May, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that elementary schools in the biggest district in the country would be required to adopt a phonics-based reading program.

The timing for such a dramatic change feels especially challenging. Elementary-school teachers are already having to recalibrate after two years of disruption; vicious fighting about public-health mandates as well as what kids should be taught about race and gender; and a widespread parental freak-out about how little their children have learned during the pandemic. Now the most fundamental skill that society asks them to pass along is also being completely shaken up.

But advocates say it cannot wait: in 2019, even before the pandemic upended instruction, only 35% of fourth-graders met the standards for reading proficiency set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an even lower number than in 2017. Only 21% of low-income students (measured by whether they qualify for free school lunch), 18% of Black students, and 23% of Hispanic students can be considered on track for reading by fourth grade. These numbers have been low for decades, but the pandemic has given the dismal results extra urgency. “There have been choices made where our children were not in the center,” says Weaver. “We abandoned what worked because we didn’t like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read.”

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They’re ‘Doing Something’ to Our Kids

What happens when you can no longer trust the people responsible for keeping your kids safe? What happens when the “Do Something” crowd only does the wrong thing?

In news that probably sounds familiar to you wherever you live, Salem-Keizer (OR) Public Schools has approved a resolution that further prohibits firearms on school grounds – at all times. Passing in a 4-3 vote, which seems like a very small decision-making group for a district of 65 schools and over 42,000 students.

As reported by the Statesman Journal:

“Salem-Keizer school board members Tuesday approved a resolution further prohibiting weapons on campus, including concealed guns. The vote directs Superintendent Christy Perry to develop and enact administrative policy to implement this…

Staff and students were already not allowed to have concealed weapons in Salem-Keizer schools. The new resolution expands restrictions to include all concealed firearms carried by campus visitors, including parents, guardians, volunteers, guest speakers, organizations renting facilities and other community members.”

But school resource officers? Gone.

But private armed security? Unarmed.

But armed teachers? Nope.

What about local law enforcement? In one of those, do-you-really-need-to-say-this moments, Perry clarified that law enforcement will still be ALLOWED to open carry their firearms onto campus in the event of an emergency. Wow. Thanks.

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Well, ‘when seconds count, the police are only minutes away‘, still applies, even for this. For if THE SCHOOL STAFF doesn’t have access to the guns, those minutes until the police arrive – and if they actually decide to actually do anything except stand around making sure their hands are sanitary- simply means more time is wasted and more people get murdered

AR-15s put in all Madison County schools to enhance security in case of active shooter.

MARSHALL – In response to the Texas school shooting that left 19 children dead May 24, the local school system and Sheriff’s Office are rolling out some beefed up security measures in 2022-23, including putting AR-15 rifles in every school.

Madison County Schools and Madison County Sheriff’s Office are collaborating to enhance security in the schools for the upcoming school year after the Uvalde, Texas, tragedy revealed systemic failures and poor decision-making, with responding police disregarding active-shooter trainings, according to a report from the Texas state house.

“Those officers were in that building for so long, and that suspect was able to infiltrate that building and injure and kill so many kids,” Sheriff Buddy Harwood said. “I just want to make sure my deputies are prepared in the event that happens.”

Madison County Schools Superintendent Will Hoffman said MCS administration has been meeting regularly with local law enforcement officials, including Harwood, to discuss the updated safety measures.

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“How to Spot a Groomer With This 1 Weird Trick”

The Clinical Steps To Grooming Kids Match Exactly How They’re Being Taught In Schools

The steps predators take to groom children for sexual abuse bear a remarkable resemblance to some modern lesson plans in American elementary schools, according to descriptions clinical experts provided to the Daily Caller.

Proponents of introducing Critical Gender Theory curricula and graphic sexual education to young children in schools have rejected the “groomer” pejorative critics recently began lobbing at them. Still, the grooming methods that experts outlined for the Caller bear a striking resemblance to some of the newer sexual education lessons the fringe political left is pushing into classrooms.

The most common tactics groomers employ are cultivating a positive reputation within a community, introducing sexualized topics or imagery to kids, isolating them from their parents, and encouraging them to keep secrets, experts told the Daily Caller. Each of these red flags have manifested themselves in classroom policies or public programs for children across America in recent years.

“I can’t think of too many times where I would think that an unrelated person should say, ‘Don’t say this to your parents,’” Daniel Pollack, professor at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work at Yeshiva University, told the Daily Caller.

“[Parents] should be informed [about sex education], especially the younger kids are,” Chris Newlin, executive director of the National Children’s Advocacy Center, said. “I’m just not a fan of things being held secret from parents, and kids being told not to tell.”

Yet a culture of secrets is exactly what’s cropping up in some schools. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that a school could institute a policy in which kids change their gender identity without informing parents. In March, a Texas elementary school told 5-year-old kids not to tell their parents what adults taught during pride week classroom discussions. A new Philadelphia policy requires teachers to hide the transgender status of students from parents.

Examples are international, too: in Canada, one school hosted a “pride dance” that parents were prohibited from seeing.

The dictionary definition of groomer is “the criminal activity of becoming friends with a child in order to try to persuade the child to have a sexual relationship,” according to the Cambridge English Dictionary. Some critics of sexualized education for kids and programs like Drag Queen Story Hour allege that kids aren’t only being groomed for potential abuse, but are being mentally groomed into a particular worldview regarding sexuality and gender.

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Oklahoma Pushes Back Against School Districts That Violated Ban on Critical Race Theory

After two Oklahoma school districts violated the state’s ban on teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT), the state took action to punish them.

In response to both Tulsa Public Schools and Mustang Public Schools violating HB 1775, which “protects our children across the state from being taught revisionist history and that ‘one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,’ or that ‘an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” the Oklahoma State Board of Education voted to give the schools an “accreditation with warning,” which is the third of a five-step process.

The warning will require the two districts to show that they have made the changes needed to meet the board’s standards.

The board decided to go a step higher than what HB 1775 recommends, which is disciplinary action for violators of “accreditation with deficiencies,” which is the second step.

According to Townhall, the incident was first revealed when the board found out that the school districts held a training course for teachers including lessons on how “to shame white people for past offenses in history.”

In addition, Tulsa Public Schools was recently found to have made two books with explicit content available to students in middle school.

22 States Sue Biden Admin for Plan to Block Lunch Money From Schools That Reject​ ‘Gen­der Iden­ti­ty’ Ideology

There are two cornerstone truths about the left — and by extension, the Democrat Party. First, the depth of left-wing hypocrisy knows no bounds. Second, there is no low to which the left will not stoop to cajole, threaten, punish, or destroy, if necessary, those opposed to their agenda, or whose agenda they oppose.

This article is about the Biden administration’s latest effort to do the latter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in May announced that K-12 schools must comply with its interpretation of the ban on discrimination based on sex in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which includes sexual orientation and gender identity — and allowing boys to use girls’ restrooms and locker rooms — in order to receive federal funding for school breakfasts, lunches, and other food items.

Enough is enough, say 22 state attorneys general, who have joined forces in a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s new “guidance,” naming the USDA as a defendant in the suit, which was filed in the Eastern District of Tennessee, as reported by UPI.

The 22 states are Indiana, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.

In the lawsuit, the attorneys general argue the USDA’s Guidance is unlawful

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‘Many, many’ Texas teachers seek to carry guns in schools, Tarrant County sheriff says

Many Texas teachers are becoming qualified to carry firearms in schools in the wake of the Uvalde mass shooting, according to Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Waybourn was part of a panel of politicians on Tuesday who spoke at an America First Policy Institute summit in Washington, D.C.

He joined Congressman Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt during a panel called, “Provide Safe and Secure Communities So All Americans Can Live Their Lives in Peace.” Pam Bondi and Matthew Whitaker led the session.

Donald Trump was scheduled to speak at the summit Tuesday afternoon. Bondi asked the panelists about various topics on policing and crime in the U.S.. She asked Waybourn what he thought needed to be done in schools in the wake of the deadly shooting in Uvalde. Waybourn apologized on behalf of Texas for the “epic failure of law enforcement in Uvalde.”

Waybourn said schools must be “hardened” to protect kids from shooters, mirroring Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s call for action to better secure schools from potential shooters. To protect schools, Waybourn said, schools need “a good guy with a gun ready to go,” whether that person is a police officer or a “well-trained vetted staff member in that school.”

“And in Texas, many, many teachers are out qualifying today as we speak,” Waybourn said. “And they’re getting ready to go.” The Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to questions about where Waybourn received his information on teachers increasingly becoming qualified to carry guns in school. In Texas, school staff can carry firearms in schools as part of the School Marshal program. Through the program, a school district applies for qualification and, if accepted, sends their selected candidate to an 80-hour training course.

Across the state, 62 school districts were qualified through the program for a total of 256 school marshals as of May, Texas Commission on Law Enforcement spokeswoman Gretchen Grigsby told the Dallas Morning News. The names of the districts and marshals are confidential. Transfer of Power A special newsletter from our D.C. Bureau focused on transition to the Biden administration.

Texas has more than 1,200 school districts, including charter schools. Texas also allows staff to carry guns on campus through the Guardian Plan. Under the authority of the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act and the Texas Penal Code, school districts can grant written permission for designated employees to carry firearms on campus.

Texas politicians, such as Attorney General Ken Paxton, have urged schools to arm teachers in the wake of the Uvalde shooting, in which a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers in May. Other school districts, including the Fort Worth school district, want politicians to focus on gun laws. On July 12, the Fort Worth school board asked Abbott to call for a special legislative session to pass “common sense” gun law policies to protect students from mass shootings. The America First Policy Institute is a nonprofit organization focused on a policy agenda for Republican leaders.

Mississippi board of education votes to let schools set their own gun policies

The move by the state board of education isn’t likely to lead to armed staff members protecting kids in Mississippi’s few Democratic bastions like Jackson, but now that the board has said individual school districts can set their own policies when it comes to guns on campus many smaller and more rural schools may very well decide that having a few trained and vetted volunteer staffers carrying to protect the students in their care is a good idea.

Late last week the state board of education updated a 1990 policy that barred anyone other than law enforcement from carrying on school grounds, arguing that the old policy conflicts with the state’s “enhanced concealed carry” law. That law specifically allows those with the enhanced carry license to lawfully carry in some “sensitive places” deemed off-limits to those carrying with a regular license or under the state’s Constitutional Carry law, and as of now the board says that districts can choose to permit or forbid employees with enhanced permits from carrying on school grounds.

At the boarding meeting, Erin Meyer, the education department’s general counsel, said state law provides “local school districts with the authority and discretion to determine” its weapons policies. School districts can decide for themselves whether or not employees who hold enhanced carry licenses can bring guns onto school property.

School districts must also adopt policies that apply to non-employees. A 2013 state attorney general’s opinion argued teachers or administrators can refuse to meet with armed people in a “non-public” school area. Mississippi K-12 schools are closed to the public, but a school concert, play or sporting event is open to the public, Cook said.

Patricia Ice, a volunteer with the Mississippi chapter of Moms Demand Action, a gun reform organization, urged school districts to adopt policies that limit firearms on campus.

“Allowing teachers and members of the public to carry guns in our K-12 schools is a dangerous idea that will further jeopardize the safety of students and staff alike,” Ice said. “We need the adults in the room to make evidence-based policy decisions that will actually keep our children safe, rather than making decisions that will put more guns in their classrooms and put our kids at risk.”

Ice can’t point to any issue in states where teachers and staff are authorized to legally carry a firearm on campus as a deterrent to a targeted attack against students, but Moms Demand Action has long opposed the idea anyway. In fact, Moms Demand Action and their parent group Everytown for Gun Safety helped sue to overturn Ohio’s armed school staff statutes, forcing lawmakers in the Buckeye State to craft new legislation this year ensuring that districts have the flexibility to adopt the practice if they choose.

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Ron DeSantis’s ‘Anti-Racist’ Mandate Leads University to Scrub Websites

The University of Central Florida (UCF) is complying with Gov. Ron DeSantis’s law prohibiting schools from accusing people of racism.

In the spring, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the “Stop WOKE Act,” which took effect on July 1 and laid out the restrictions of how race is taught in schools. It includes barring instruction that claims an individual’s “moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is determined by his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

In its reporting of the development, the Associated Press (AP) noted that some critics are outraged that the content has been removed:

In an email, UCF spokesperson Chad Binette said the school recently removed departmental statements that could be seen as “potentially inconsistent with our commitment to creating a welcoming environment — one where faculty objectively engage students in robust, scholarly discussions that expand their knowledge and empower them to freely express their views and form their own perspectives.”

“UCF is committed to building a culture that values respect, civil discourse, and creating a sense of belonging,” said Binette, the school’s assistant vice president of communications.

“This is a complete infringement of academic freedom,” Ann Gleig, a religious studies professor at UCF, said. “The statement was crafted over a period of time with dialogue and input across a person plus faculty trained in philosophy, religion and cultural studies and the humanities.”

“The DeSantis regime has made the anti-racist mission of my alma mater against the law,” Democrat State Representative Carlos G. Smith, a UCF graduate, tweeted. “This is a consequence of HB 7 and the Governor’s out-of-control censorship agenda. This is not freedom.”

The AP reported that according to the Orlando Sentinel, the anthropology department’s website previously said, “We acknowledge that many of us are born with unearned privilege, while others are denied basic human rights.”

For the parents that don’t like this new policy; If I were on the school board, I’d suggest the district have one school with no armed security at all, and send all their children there. Then make sure that it was widely known that all the schools, except for that one, did have armed teachers as well as armed  security officers.

Cobb school board approves measure to create new position that will allow some employees to carry guns
The school board approved the measure with a vote of 4-2.

COBB COUNTY, Ga. — The Cobb County School Board approved a measure Thursday evening during its meeting to create a new position for some employees to carry guns on school campuses. The measure, however, does not include teachers.

The school board approved the measure with a vote of 4-2. Teachers or anyone who oversees a classroom will not be allowed to carry weapons.

The moves comes weeks after a gunman walked inside of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and killed 19 students and two teachers.

However, even with the mass shooting in mind, Thursday night’s vote in Cobb County didn’t come without controversy.

A group of protests delayed the meeting as some chanted “delay the vote.” School board member Dr. Jaha Howard tried to get a motion passed to move the vote to next month, but the board voted against it.

Some parents were outraged over the policy. Laura Judge believes the move could be dangerous.

“You have younger kids that are curious and they’re looking for different things, I don’t want them to happen upon a weapon and then you have older kids that are bigger than some of these individuals and I don’t want them to wrestle a weapon away,” said Judge, who is a parent.

Alisha Thomas Searcy, running for Georgia’s state school superintendent, said the language in the policy is too vague.

“We’re talking about the lives of children, the lives of educators, that deserves the time and attention and thoroughness to sit down with professionals, law enforcement in particular to make sure the right policy is in place,” Searcy said.

With the new measure, employees carrying a gun would be reporting to public safety and would also have to be trained in judgment, pistol shooting, marksmanship, and have a review of current laws relating to the use of force and self-defense. There will also be psychological screening and a background check conducted.

The superintendent can waive the training requirements if the employee has already received law enforcement or military training. The superintendent also has a say in what types of weapons can be used.

Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said the armed employees would not be identified; he said keeping that part a secret will help prevent would-be attackers.

Los Angeles public schools training teachers that ‘merit,’ ‘individualism’ rooted in ‘whiteness’
Los Angeles teachers told ‘the idea of meritocracy’ must be challenged in schools

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is training teachers and staff that “merit” and “individualism” are concepts rooted in “whiteness” that must be challenged in schools.

LAUSD required all employees to undergo “implicit/unconscious bias training” guided by Tyrone Howard, a critical race theory (CRT) advocate and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, prior to the 2021-2022 school year.

The training materials, which were obtained by Fox News Digital through a California Public Records Act (PRA) request, instructed educators to work toward being “antiracist” by challenging whiteness at school, which Howard argued exists in the concepts of “merit” and “individualism.”

“This idea that white is the standard, white is the norm, white is our default has to be challenged,” Howard said in the training video.

Merit, or meritocracy, “assumes that each person operates and achieves based on his or her own personal capacity,” the training handout reads. “It incorporates the notion that the work put forth, the effort invested, explains why some groups and individuals do well and others do not. It does not consider historical factors or account for opportunities, advantages, and privileges to which some groups have access both historically and in the present.”

“The idea of meritocracy,” Howard said in the video, “I think we have to challenge that because we have to recognize that some groups have had much more opportunities, some groups have had far more advantages, and some groups have certain types of privileges that other groups have not had.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) required all employees to undergo "implicit/unconscious bias training" prior to the 2021-2022 school year.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) required all employees to undergo “implicit/unconscious bias training” prior to the 2021-2022 school year. (Screenshot / Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD))

 

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If it’s from a Yale law professor, you can bet it’s unconstitutional

Yale law prof suggests new route to carry ban, but is it constitutional?

Short answer? Almost certainly not, based on what the Supreme Court said last week in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, but as we’ve already seen in states like New York, New Jersey, and California, anti-gun activists aren’t letting a little thing like a Supreme Court decision get in the way of their desire to disarm average, everyday Americans.

So what is Ian Ayres’ big idea? Basically, he wants to flip the current law in the vast majority of states to make concealed carry banned on private property unless the owners of that property decide to allow it.

You might be surprised to learn that when you ask someone to come and repair your dishwasher, they can legally carry a concealed weapon into your kitchen unless you expressly object. In all but three states and D.C., any visitor can, by default, carry a firearm into your home without your explicit permission. The repairman has a Second Amendment right to bear arms, but you have a right to control whether people carry guns onto your land.

A central attribute of property ownership is the right to exclude unwanted people from your land. Forty-seven states fail to adequately protect this right of landowners to control their property because they provide the wrong default rule regarding the right of invitees to bear arms. Property owners cannot make an informed choice if they don’t know they have to object (more than two-thirds of people are unaware of these default rules). And it is hard for a property owner to know that she needs to object when the objectionable firearm is concealed.

The same problem exists regarding private commercial land. All 50 states permit individuals to carry their firearms into private retail establishments by default. Private businesses must post “No Guns” signs to make their stores gun-free, and these signs must often meet strict requirements. Many retailers fear customer backlash if they post signs either restricting or permitting gun carry in their stores. So, they are inclined to stick with a state’s default rule regardless of their preferences.

If this idea sounds familiar it’s because New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has decided to implement this idea, at least when it comes to businesses, as part of plan to defy the Supreme Court and make it as difficult as possible for New Yorkers to exercise their right to armed self-defense in public.

There are two big problems with Ayers idea; one constitutional and one practical. As Ayers himself notes, every state in the union says that if you want to ban guns from commercial properties you can do so, but you must provide notice to the public in some form or fashion. 47 out of 50 states take the same view when it comes to non-commercial private property. These laws are widespread and longstanding, and there is nothing in the history or tradition of the right to keep and bear arms that supports what Ayers (and Hochul) are demanding. Given the negative implications that these policies would have on the right of the people to bear arms for self-defense in public and the fact that they have no similar analogues in American history, I don’t think there’s any way that they would be upheld by the Supreme Court.

From a practical perspective the idea is just as flawed. Ayers acknowledges that “it is hard for a property owner to know that she needs to object when the objectionable firearm is concealed,” and that wouldn’t change if all privately-owned spaces become gun-free zones by default. It would be just as difficult to determine if someone was carrying in violation of the law, but we’d also likely see far more individuals inadvertently doing so because of the reversal of the longstanding status quo. Ayers idea wouldn’t stop a single violent criminal, but would turn a lot of otherwise law-abiding citizens into accidental outlaws because they would no longer be able to legally carry in most of the places where they’ve been able to exercise their right to bear arms in the past.

Part of Ayers’ problem is that he, like many other gun control fans, still just doesn’t want to accept that the right to keep and bear arms is a real right. In his piece at The Hill, the Yale professor claims that the Second Amendment is about “individuals’ ability to defend their homes by arming themselves.” That is simply not true. The right to keep and bear arms is fundamentally about protecting yourself, not your property, and as the Supreme Court made clear last week, the right of self-defense doesn’t stop once you set foot outside your front door. If private property owners want to ban lawful carrying on their premises they can do so, but in a country with a right to keep and bear arms, the default position has historically respected that right and must continue to do so in the future.

Funding Fantasy and Ignoring Evil as we Protect Our Students

Our schools are attacked by disgruntled students and former students. Our schools are also attacked by outsiders who select the school so they can murder innocent victims. We have had armed staff protecting our schools for years. We’ve learned from their vast experience so we know how to protect our children. The latest act from congress, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, doesn’t do that. In fact, it prohibits it, and that tells us everything.

We’d like it if every child developed a fully formed conscience. That isn’t the real world. I’ve met neglected children who were raised by parents who were physically or mentally ill. I’ve met children who were raised a neglectful addict. Some people who lack a conscience are made. That experience can turn healthy children into violent sociopaths. Mental health treatment will help some of them. The Safer Communities Act does a little to help them.

Some people who lack a conscience are born. About 3-in-a-hundred of us are psychopaths and lack empathy and sympathy with other people. Some of them are also narcissists who think the world owes them more attention. Mental health treatment doesn’t change their propensity towards violence.

The Safer Communities Act can’t change the human condition. We are broken, and some of us much more so than others.

The problem of evil has always been with us. Yes, we want to help children so they don’t want to murder their classmates. That does not solve the larger problem of protecting our schools. What should we do with the evil in the world that wants to kill our kids?

We have several-million-man-hours of experience with armed school staff who volunteered to be first responders. They trained to stop a violent threat and stop the bleeding until outside help arrives. We have never had a child killed in school by an outside attack when these defenders were there.

We have also seen what happens when the school is disarmed. We saw the police wait outside at the high school in Parkland, Florida. We again saw the police wait outside as children were being murdered in Uvalde, Texas. We’ve seen similar carnage in attacks on a gun-free zone away from school where the victims had to wait for the police to save them.

Thank god that we have dedicated police officers on campus protecting our children every day. These officers tell us that too many students will die if we wait for outside help to stop an attacker. The Safer Communities Act ignores their advice. The Safer Communities Act explicitly prohibits funding to arm or to train armed school staff. That tells us everything about the legislation and the politicians who proposed it.

These politicians need public violence so they can hold a press conference and appear concerned. Expressing that faux-concern is more important to the politicians than really protecting our kids.

One way to stop narcisists from attacking our schools is to stop electing them to public office. Until then, work with your local school board.

Will We Choose Hard Work to Protect Our Children in School?

Set aside what you imagine about guns and protecting students at school. Keeping our kids safe is hard work. It is ugly and almost always unappreciated. We don’t want appreciation for what we’ve been forced to do if a murderer comes to school. It is far better to be known for what we prevented. Defending our students from media-fueled narcissistic psychopaths is a dull job. Being present every day so you can stop a murderer is easily ignored because it is out of sight. Contrast that grinding job with the one-click solution of “gun control”. Gun-control politicians say they can put a few more words on paper, hold a few press conferences, and it will be as if evil simply went away.. or did it? We’re conducting several large-scale social experiments at the same time. Our children’s lives depend on what we do.

Each day brings us something new. Our children live in a world where they are exposed to millions of online “friends” they’ve never met. Many of these friends might not even be real people. These online identities influence how our children think and feel. I’m not sure about the benefits, but the downside has been a surge in both narcissism and anorexia. Today, our children constantly compare themselves to an image on a small screen.

We also have millions of children growing up in broken homes. Many of these children are raised by the entertainment media and by electronic games. That isn’t good for healthy children, let alone the children who lack a healthy mom and dad. We also know that we are not all the same and that electronic games are catastrophic for some people. These gamers already feel alienated to an unusual degree. They think they deserve more recognition. Immerse these fragile youngsters into hundreds of hours of violent first-person roll-playing games, and something happens. The psychopaths eventually think to themselves, ‘I’d kill to get this much attention.’ Our voracious news media is ready to oblige. That is new.

In contrast, firearms have been a part of society for a relatively long time. We have lived with guns for at least the last four centuries. We’ve lived with semi-automatic rifles for over a hundred years. The so-called “assault rifle” is over 80 years old. What changed is that we’ve never grown up with mass media in our pocket 24-7 starting when children are 6 years of age. We don’t know what that does to people, and we’re conducting the real-time experiment on our children and on our society. We learn new things every day.

We’ve seen the mass media turn the last murderer into an instant celebrity by giving him a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign. The next murderer notices the attention poured on the last murderer. That creates a new generation of “celebrity-murderers”, a term that didn’t exist as little as two decades ago. We’ve seen over 80 copycat murderers after the attack on Columbine High School, but that data is now several years out of date.

Not only are our children ill-prepared to deal with the media, but adults and politicians do only a little better. The public is influenced by the most outrageous claim that can be taken from a situation or statement. The media and unscrupulous politicians feed us a series of false choices. Please consider each of these claims for more than a minute and you can easily see a context in which each statement is clearly right. You can also see a context in which the claim is clearly wrong.

  • You don’t care if our children die since you won’t disarm everyone,
    • but we’ve seen mass murders where firearms are banned.
  • It doesn’t help to put mental health counselors in school because we have to insure patient privacy and confidentiality,
    • but we’ve seen mental health counselors help, and we’ve also seen counselors be completely ineffective at identifying and treating violent patients.
  • Violence isn’t the answer,
    • but we have to use violence as necessary to stop the attacker or else we’ll perpetuate the next cycle of media-fueled murderers.
  • Don’t turn the murderer into a media celebrity,
    • but we have the right of free speech and freedom of the press.

Let me say it again that we are not all the same. Psychopaths are part of our population and always have been. We’ve seen the behavior of psychopaths change in our modern media environment. Today we see psychopaths target innocent victims in gun-free zones because that behavior rewarded by the mass media. Examined in hindsight, the murderers spent years happily planning their attacks. The threat of celebrity-violence is increasing as a greater number of fragile children are immersed in electronic media, and news outlets reward the latest murderer with greater and more sensational coverage.

We should be hungry for facts about protecting our children. Of course, we worry about what would happen if we allowed volunteer staff to be trained and then to go armed at school. But we already know what happens. We already have millions of man-hours with trained and armed-school staff on campus. Despite what we imagine, these staff have not had firearms accidents at school. More importantly, we have not seen a successful attack at a school when trained and armed school staff were present. We need to set our fantasies aside.

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The original training requirement – just 37 hours less than the Basic Police Officer course in an Ohio police academy – was a ‘poison pill’ the gun grabbers had stuck in, hoping the bill would never get passed.
Well, live by the politics, die by the politics

Ohio governor signs bill making it easier for teachers to have guns in schools

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Monday that he has signed a bill into law that makes it much easier for teachers to legally carry guns in schools.

The measure drastically reduces the amount of training teachers and other staff are required to undergo before they can possess a firearm on school grounds. Instead of 700 hours of training, teachers will be able to finish in less than 24 hours.

“Our goal is to continue to help our public and private schools get the tools they need to protect our children,” DeWine said. “We have an obligation to do everything we can every single day to try and protect our kids.”

DeWine, a Republican, said in a statement on June 1 that the bill would allow “local school districts, if they so chose, to designate armed staff for school security and safety,” adding that it was more practical than the state’s previous standard.

School resource officer shoots, kills ‘suspicious person’ outside Alabama school

GADSDEN, Ala. (AP) — Authorities say a person who was outside an Alabama elementary school was shot to death by police.

Etowah County Sheriff Jonathon Horton tells The Gadsden Times there was a report of someone trying to get into either Walnut Park Elementary School or vehicles outside the building on Thursday morning.

Other officers responded and the person was shot to death. One officer suffered minor injuries. All the children are safe.

Tony Reddick, Superintendent of Gadsden City Schools, said he received an urgent call from Walnut Park’s principal.

“I got a call from the principal who’s really distraught, and I really couldn’t make out what was happening,” he told News Channel 8 sister station WIAT. “But I knew it was something pretty bad.”

He told WIAT that the school system is vigilant in preparing for events like these. He and the school’s principal, he said, had just participated in a seminar that included school safety training on Monday.

Excellent lambs

In the 1960s, campus protesters rejected adult authority, writes William Deresiewicz. Now the “young progressive elite” want the grownups to protect them from emotional and psychological harm, writes William Deresiewicz on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.

Not much has changed since he wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite in 2013, he writes.

We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.

. . . The attributes of adulthood — responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control — are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how.

“Beware of prepackaged rebellions,” he tells the Class of 2022. “That protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd.”

Becoming an independent person isn’t easy, writes Deresiewicz. “Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”

Stanford University (motto: “Let the winds of freedom blow.”) doesn’t want to let students grow up, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute in the Washington Examiner.

The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.

Under the ResX plan, students are assigned to a campus “neighborhood” for their undergraduate careers, Evers writes.  They will find ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community).”

Students’ social life is regulated: Students must register any party they host, he writes. Get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals are banned, as is hard liquor and drinking games, even for students 21 and older.

These measures “have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends,” Evers writes. “These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.”