Category: education and schooling

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights

Don’t Mention the Menace

school board, education, schools, gangs, censorship

“It was a chaotic ending to the public comment period during Tuesday night’s Loudoun County [Virginia] School Board meeting,” reports WJLA, the ABC affiliate in our nation’s capital, “when Chair Melinda Mansfield ended that portion of the hearing after giving multiple warnings to parents raising concerns about a current student with alleged gang ties [who] was arrested last year for carrying a gun and making threats to kill a classmate.”

Well, a public official did indeed put parents on notice not to talk further about the problem they came to discuss. However, a student who carries a firearm to school and threatens to murder his or her peers does perhaps warrant some smidgen of dialogue. 

“According to sources with knowledge of the situation,” WJLA informs, “the student is allegedly connected to the MS-13 gang and is in the U.S. illegally.”

Parent Abbie Platt divulged that her “daughter is terrified to go to school with him.”

Four parents addressed the school board regarding this student; each was cut off by the board’s chair who accused them of “breaking the school board policy” by “providing information that could identify the student.”

“Everything that was brought up in this public comment is already public knowledge,” explains Tiffany Polifko, a parent and former school board member, telling the board that to “stop your constituents from speaking” is a classic violation of the First Amendment.

A spokesperson for Loudon County Public Schools defended the board’s speech squelching: “Even some minor details could lead . . . to the identity of a student, that’s just not a situation we’re comfortable with, that we’re going to accept.”

So, your kid needs to accept the risk of brutal torture and death, and you need to be quiet about it — because even discussing the danger might reveal the identity of the murder-and-mayhem-threatening student.

Those are public school priorities. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

XX Marks the Offense

armband, censorship, free speech

Educators, used to tyrannizing the young, are too often tempted to turn their powerlust to their charges’ parents. Yesterday, I discussed Michigan educators keeping their curriculum secret from members of their community. Today we turn to the way officials at Bow High School in New Hampshire have treated Kyle Fellers, Anthony Foote, Nicole Foote, and Eldon Rash. 

These parents and a grandparent attended a girls’ soccer game while non-disruptively wearing wristbands labeled XX to protest a policy allowing a boy to play on the opposing team. The “XX” refers to the sex chromosomes of females.

Because Fellers, Foote, Foote, and Rash wore the wrong apparel, school officials and a police officer told them to remove the wristbands or leave. When they refused, the school scolders threatened them with arrest for “trespassing.”

For attending a game where their kids were playing?

The school later banned two of the wristband-wearers from school grounds and events, among other things making it harder for them to pick up their kids after a game.

“The idea that I would be censored and threatened with removal from a public event for standing by my convictions is not just a personal affront — it is an infringement of the very rights I swore to defend,” says Andy Foote, who has a long career in the Army under his belt.

Now, with the help of the Institute for Free Speech, the renegade wristband-wearers are suing the school in hopes that it will, on First Amendment grounds, be enjoined from restricting “nondisruptive expression of political or social views at extracurricular events. . . .”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling government transparency

The Secret Teachings of Our Age

education, school, ideology, politics

The high school course was not “Logic and Semiotics in Western Culture” — or “Eastern.” It was not “Memes for Momes.” Or even “Cartoons from Cave Walls to Bathroom Stalls.”

It was “A History of Ethnic and Gender Studies.”

Do we dare ask what’s in it?

Doesn’t matter. Because we’re not allowed to see what’s in it.

“Michigan parents can’t request some school curricula under public record acts after the Michigan Supreme Court chose not to hear an appeal from a lower court,” explains the Michigan Capitol Confidential.

“On Sept. 25, the state’s top court denied an appeal filed by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on behalf of a Rochester parent who requested the curriculum for a class held in the Rochester Public Schools district.” Using the “the state’s Freedom of Information Act, Carol Beth Litkouhi in 2022 sought course materials” for the class mentioned above. “Rochester Public Schools refused. The district argued that the law did not require it to provide records held by teachers.”

And so far — and barring a revision of state law — the public schools have won. 

Not a happy story, but even more than bad news for Michigan parents and (by extension) their children (the students in public schools), it demonstrates a mindset we’ve encountered before, and not confined to one school district or one state.

According to educators in public service, they have a right to teach your kids and not tell you what they are doing.

They are committed to doing this.

They are indoctrinators and not on your side.

They must be stopped. Politically. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Harvard, Hamas and Harassment

student protests, Harvard, Gaza, Palestine, antisemitism, Jews

Let’s assume that most Harvard University officials harbor no special animus against Jews.

Let’s also assume that the school’s willingness to ignore its own policies while Jewish students were the focus last year of what Judge Richard Stearn agrees was “‘severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive’. . . harassment” by Hamas supporters was motivated, rather, only by lack of courage.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, let’s say that Harvard officials were motivated only by craven unwillingness to go against one of the latest left-wing ideological fads, that of letting anti-Israel agitators run wild.

But a policy that protects students from harassment and assault only when this is easy or fashionable to do — while insisting on “freedom of speech” for persons pushing past obnoxious speech into criminal assault and battery — is not much of a policy.

Stearns’s ruling is not a binding decision on the merits of the plaintiffs’ lawsuit. He simply allowed it to proceed.

His refusal to dismiss means that he finds the plaintiffs’ argument plausible — the argument that Harvard has violated its contractual obligations by observing what pro-Hamas students were doing to other students with supreme institutional indifference.

Indeed, he finds that the protests “were, at times, confrontational and physically violent, and plaintiffs legitimately fear their repetition. The harassment also impacted plaintiffs’ life experience at Harvard; they dreaded walking through the campus, missed classes, and stopped participating in extracurricular events.”

Peaceful protest ends when riot, assault, and intimidation begin. Institutions of both law and higher learning should always make that dividing line as clear as possible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Racial Land Mine of First Grade

BLM, Black Lives Matter, all lives matter, education, schools

You can’t let kids get away with anything.

Schools must apply some discipline. Otherwise, chaos would ensue. Talking out of turn, pulling pigtails, passing notes . . . and, not least, an epidemic of expressing benign thoughts inconsistent with the poisonous race-conscious ideology that some schools seek to inculcate.

In March 2021, a little girl known as “B.B.” in court documents got into trouble for drawing a group of classmates of different races. She added the words “Black Lives Matter” and, below that, “any life.” She gave the drawing to a black classmate to try to comfort him, as she later explained.

Had B.B. been more attuned to the racial controversies of the day — does she not follow The New York Times and CNN? — she might have realized what treacherous waters she had dived into. 

As it was, she was surprised when the school forced her to apologize to her classmate and forbade her from drawing any more pictures while in school and from attending recess for two weeks.

The parents sued. A district court ruled in favor of the school, but the parents, helped by Pacific Legal Foundation, are appealing.

The district judge says that whether First Amendment protections of free speech apply here depends on whether such speech, however innocent, would “significantly interfere with the discipline needed for the school to function.”

The drawing could hardly have thus interfered unless part of the school’s “function” is to impose race-conscious orthodoxy. 

And suppress even the slightest peep of unwary dissent.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom too much government

The State vs. Homework

school, education, teaching, home work

Oy, the stress. Of doing stuff. It’s nonstop.

If a California lawmaker gets her way, it will stop, though, at least in the schools. Or at least slow way down.

Consider the pressure, the horrible grinding pressure of having to practice math problems, peer at chemical formulas, read assigned readings, summarize, spell, grammarize, memorize names and dates and Spanish vocabulary, and on and on and on . . . en casa. . . .

It’s the kind of thing that can curdle a kid’s physical and mental health. Not to mention cut into playtime.

So is the legislation AB2999 justified?

Is Assemblywoman Pilar Schiavo warranted in hoping to require school boards to ponder the “reasonable amount of time spent on homework per student that should not be exceeded” or whether “homework should be assigned . . . in any elementary school grade, inclusive” or perhaps that homework be “optional and not graded,” et cetera?

Well, if we think about this, we must admit that there is one and only one reason to ever require students to spend time at home mastering what is introduced in class. Only to prepare them for earning a living and living life by helping them obtain knowledge and skills and realize their potential.

But that’s it. That’s the only reason.

Of course, individual teachers, if competent and conscientious, already think about what homework is appropriate to assign. They must, we hope, want their students to function capably in life. And maybe also to learn that learning is not torture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling national politics & policies tax policy

Trump to Ax Tip Tax

Joe Biden, taxes, tipping, student loans, buying votes, debt

When Biden panders to his lower-income supporters, he targets zeroing out their student debt and regulating credit card companies with further restrictions on their ability to charge for overdrafts and the like.

When Trump panders to his lower-income supporters, he promises to exempt tips from income taxation, as he did recently in Las Vegas.

This may be the most obvious difference between left- and right-styles in politicking to the masses, good-ol’-fashioned vote-buying or its twin: leftists forgive debts and add regulations, rightists reduce taxes.

Like me, you may, at first blanch, prefer the latter form of pandering, but Eric Boehm, at Reason, offers some reasons not to look so kindly on Trump’s pandering. First, and most obviously: “Reducing revenue without identifying offsetting spending cuts means Trump is merely promising to borrow more heavily.”

A bigger challenge comes later: “On the surface, that sounds great. But there’s already one likely unintended consequence: A lot more income will suddenly be reported as tips. Any time a government gives preferential tax treatment to one type of economic activity, you tend to get a lot more of that type of economic activity. Does that mean we’ll have an entirely tip-based economy?” The answer is a likely No.

Oddly, Mr. Boehm doesn’t address one obvious element: Tips aren’t wages and they aren’t profits. Tips are gifts. They aren’t determined by employers and they aren’t specified by employees. And gifts aren’t taxed as income like other income is.

So letting people who accept tips in the course of their labors not pay taxes on them is really, really hard to object to.

In fact, I don’t object.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Lilly Loves Me

Starbucks, ideological culture, friendship, business

Lilly loves me. That’s the good news. 

I love her, too. Funny thing, though, I don’t even know Lilly’s last name. You see, she works at my local Starbucks. She makes a mean flat white. 

I do know how to say “thank you” in Vietnamese — sounds like “gahm un.” Her folks hail from Vietnam. One day a man spoke Vietnamese with her and she lit up. So I learned those two words in Vietnamese. 

The bad news — or the other good news — is that she recently hurt my feelings. 

You see, after my heart attack of a couple months ago, I scaled back my flat white drinking. When I first ordered a tall (that is, a small) instead of my usual venti (large), well, my Starbucks peeps thought there might be a tear in the universe. 

I explained that I wanted to cut down on my caffeine and milk intake post heart attack.* Which immediately got them onboard with my change.

But soon I backslid to a grande (medium). Then, with the price difference to move up to a venti size so enticingly small . . . well, I was back to venti. 

The other day when Lilly was delivering my drink, she saw its size and questioned, “You’re already back to a venti?”

Ouch! It felt like when I’ve disappointed my kids or wife or other loved ones. 

Because . . . Lilly is a loved one. I care about her — like so many of her workmates whom I’ve gotten to know. And she cares about me, a venti-size concern! She wants me to live. More than the extra 20-30 cents her employer might make from the larger drink. 

When I mention Starbucks, many think about it being a liberal corporation.** I, however, think about the mostly young people I’ve met, working their butts off to advance themselves while being so kind and decent with customers; thoughtful in conversation. 

Young people these days . . . I love ’em. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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* For the record, this change wasn’t something my cardiologist specifically advised; just me trying to improve my diet to live a long time.

** Consider that back in 2020 Starbuck’s pioneering CEO Howard Schultz wasn’t “progressive” enough to be comfortable running for president in the Democratic Party. 

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education and schooling ideological culture regulation

To Die for DEI

hospital, doctor, D.E.I. DEI, diversity, equality, inclusion

Next time you’re being operated on, you probably don’t want your doctor to be someone trained and hired solely because he satisfied affirmative-action criteria.

We’ll have to especially worry about this possibility, though, if trends at certain institutions continue — including at universities such as UCLA Medical School. There, up to half the students are now flunking basic tests of medical knowledge.

By design.

In November 2021, a new dean of admissions, Jennifer Lucero, “exploded in anger” because an admissions officer had doubts about admitting a black applicant whose academic credentials were way below the average of other students at the school.

“Did you not know African-American women are dying at a higher rate than everybody else?” she wanted to know, demonstrating a capacity for non sequiturs. Forget scores: “we need people like this in the medical school.”

The time for UCLA professors and admissions officers to raise hell about Lucero’s illegally race-conscious admissions policies was then, or sooner. At least now, though, many are speaking out.

“I don’t know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors,” one instructor tells the Free Beacon. “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

“I wouldn’t normally talk to a reporter,” says another. “But there’s no way to stop this without embarrassing the medical school.”

Well, word is out now — and in abundant detail. Let’s hope it’s not too late to set this school and others back on the right track.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Letting DEI Die

MIT, DEI, college, racism, collectivism, sexism

The good news? 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will no longer require applicants to make DEI statements.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says the school can “build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Correct on both counts, but a bit blah as indictments go. And inadequate. Forget “inclusive.” This is merely a pledge to refrain from being arbitrarily exclusionary.

But the new policy is better than the status quo.

DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) may sound innocuous, at worst pointless. But DEI guidelines have functioned as a particularly odious form of ideological litmus test. The goal has been to force instructors to toe certain leftist (or collectivist) ideological lines as if the ideas imposed were as self-evidently true as declarations that the cloudless sky is cerrulian blue.

For example, if you dare disagree that race-conscious “antiracist” policies making skin color — and maybe also “gender” — more important than quality of work or some reliable leading indicators of productivity, your views may put you on the wrong side of the DEI divide.

So MIT’s dropping of mandatory DEI-fealty statements is a big step in the right direction. By as prestigious an institution of higher learning as any in the world.

The bad news? 

MIT has apparently not fired the “diversity deans” that it hired in 2021 — and hired not on the basis of excellence of qualifications: serious plagiarism complaints have been filed against two of these personnel!

If MIT retains six “diversity deans” in place, able to run around causing trouble for those faculty who reject DEI edicts, it hasn’t purged itself of the poison quite yet.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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