Category: education and schooling

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education and schooling judiciary subsidy

One Way or Another or Another

student debt relief

The courts have not been kind to President Joe Biden’s unilateral attempt to erase some $200 billion to $500 billion in student-loan debt. (By “erase” I mean force all taxpayers to pay debt incurred by the millions of borrowers eligible for the forgiveness program.)

Last month, a federal judge issued a temporary stay on the program while the litigation plays out.

On November 10, another federal judge, Mark Pittman, ruled that the program is a “complete usurpation” of congressional authority. Per Pittman, the U.S. is “not ruled by an all-powerful executive [but] by a Constitution that provides for three distinct and independent branches of government.”

In consequence, the Biden administration stopped accepting applications for student-loan debt relief. By then more some 26 million borrowers had applied.

On November 14, another federal court also blocked the program. So Biden’s debt-transfer plan is apparently at least thrice bogged down.

Except that another student-loan-debt-erasing thing has been going on since early in the pandemic, a pause on debt payments rationalized by the economic hardship imposed by lockdowns.

This pause was set to lapse at the end of this year, with payments to resume in January. But according to a White House insider “familiar with the matter,” the administration has been making “increasingly firm plans to extend the repayment pause.”

The pause also costs taxpayers money. The original rationale for it no longer exists. Like the mega-debt-relief program, extending the pause would also be unconstitutional.

This subsidy is also unlikely to inspire kindness from the courts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Weak Link in Chain of Corruption

education, indoctrination, public school, private school, home schooling

How do you replace anti-child school board members with persons of common sense? That is, with those who favor educating children rather than indoctrinating them with socialism and racism?

This is not a battle that all parents need to fight directly on behalf of their own children. Those who can enroll them in a sane private or charter school, or homeschool them, may do that instead.

But parents who are taking on corrupt school boards have found a couple of very effective approaches.

One, recall campaigns. 

Some board members are so horrible that parents will catapult themselves to polling stations for the chance to oust them. Unfortunately, not all voters everywhere have the right to recall crummy officials.

Two, regular board elections.

But to succeed in replacing the zanies entrenched in many school boards with better persons, one must field appropriate candidates.

Among those who have been doing the necessary preparatory work in Minnesota, where “the teachers’ union, Education Minnesota, has largely run our state for decades,” are John Hinderaker of Powerline fame and the members of his organization Minnesota Parents Alliance.

The Alliance reports that in the recent election, its candidates won 49 seats statewide, “with victories in 15 of 19 targeted districts.”

It’s just a beginning. But, wow, a substantial beginning. And fast. The Alliance was created only a year ago. This achievement is also a ray of hope and proof of concept that we parents (and grandparents; and uncles and aunts) in the other 49 states really need.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling First Amendment rights folly general freedom

Freedom of Disassociation?

forced inclusion

Groucho Marx famously quipped that he wouldn’t want to join any club that would have him as a member. Some people take this hankering to an extreme: they want to force every group averse to their membership to accept them.

Keywords: forced inclusion. The current political rage — thought to be a “right.”

Now, Yeshiva University, which calls itself “the world’s premier Torah-based institution of higher education,” does not accept homosexuality. It’s against the Law.

And by “the Law” they mean: the ancient Jewish scriptures.

For those of us who are neither Jewish nor gay, we might look upon both groups as “clubs.”  And being in neither, we might just shrug; we aren’t going to be accepted in the either ranks and that’s just fine.

But some students at Yeshiva University tried to form an LGBT group on campus. The university resisted, the case went to court, and a court ordered the university to accept the group. And then last week, the Supreme Court refused to order a stay on the lower court’s order.

In reaction, Yeshiva University has suspended all campus club activities.

“Every faith-based university in the country has the right to work with its students, including its LGBTQ students, to establish the clubs, places and spaces that fit within its faith tradition,” the university’s president proclaimed. “Yeshiva University simply seeks that same right of self-determination.”

Since the right to “freedom of association” is part of the Bill of Rights, one might think this would be non-controversial in America. And settled law. 

But one would be wrong. On both counts. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The Liars

teacher, education, gender, trans

Talk about proof positive that school officials have a policy of lying to parents about their children!

According to Fox News, Kansas teacher Pamela Ricard contends that “deceiving parents about their children’s pronouns was against her Christian beliefs.”

Yet her bosses demanded this precise deceit.

Officials at Fort Riley Middle School suspended Ricard for referring to a transgender child by his or her legal name and by standard pronouns rather than by his or her preferred name and pronouns. (The Fox News report is coy about the actual sex of the child.) Ricard had also been ordered to use only the legal name and standard pronouns when speaking to the child’s parents — i.e., to conceal the child’s stated preferences.

Parents of any religion, or none, may well dispute the notion that when their kid suggests that he or she is “really” a member of the opposite sex, this profession of sexual faith points in a direction that any supportive adult ought only to encourage and sanction.

Of course, it is precisely the fact that parents may well disagree with school officials about the appropriate response to such intimations that inspires dishonest officials with an ideological-cultural agenda to demand that parents be lied to.

With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, Pamela Ricard won a settlement of $95,000 from the Geary County school district for its treatment of her. After she filed the lawsuit, the district dropped its policy of lying to parents.

At least, so they say.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Justice (Almost) Done

donuts, racist, college

It ain’t over until the money’s in the bank. But one wrong, long fought, may soon be righted. Justice done.

Years ago, Gibson’s Bakery won a judgment of $38 million against Oberlin College because of the Ohio school’s role in harassing the bakery and defaming it as “racist” after a 2016 shoplifting incident.  

The shopkeeper of the family-donuts, racist, college bakery, Allyn Gibson, caught students trying to steal wine. They attacked him. They were black.

For whatever reasons, students on campus chugged into uproar mode, accusing the bakery of racism as if it prefers to be robbed only by persons of pallor. 

The shoplifters eventually pled guilty and acknowledged that the bakery is not racist.

The students’ irrationality was bad enough. Then Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo chimed in, working with protesters to defame the bakery. The school canceled its contract with Gibson’s and would claim in legal filings that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”

In 2017, the bakery sued Oberlin and won.

Oberlin has been appealing. Now it has lost in the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.

Only the U.S. Supreme Court can save Oberlin now. But according to the Legal Insurrection blog, the chances that it will even consider the case are slim.

Is $38 million the right award? Perhaps Oberlin should pay Gibson’s $50 million. Or a cool billion. 

But Oberlin deserves to be punished just as Gibson’s deserves to be compensated. 

May this finally happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

Power Theory

CRT, critical race theory, communism, racism, race

What if CRT were precisely about what its advocates say it is?

“Far-right white people are in a moral panic over Critical Race Theory,” Pennsylvania educators are being taught, “because they fear losing political power.”

Beth Brelje, at The Epoch Times, explains that this is the lesson of a “a webinar presented by Justice Leaders Collaborative, a Michigan-based social justice training organization.” Ms. Brelje quotes Shayla Reese Griffin, the webinar leader, who states that these “far-right white people” are “really just using Critical Race Theory as a kind of an umbrella term for any kind of cultural things that the far-right isn’t interested in.”

This is, of course, disingenuous. Critical Race Theory is not merely an umbrella term. It is a theory of power that tracks oppression (which is a specific variety of power) along rigid class lines, the classes being defined by race.

And it is a movement of the “far left.” 

Which is why CRT’s defenders and obfuscationists identify their opponents as “far right.”

Heaven forbid were moderates and centrists also to object!

It’s a bluffing tactic, this extremist-identification, aiming to make moderates, centrists, and just normal, non-political people ashamed to criticize CRT.

It’s manipulative.

CRT’s way off, since power, broadly defined, is everywhere and omnipresent and omnidirectional — everybody has some power, nobody has all power. Critical race theorists aim to ply victimhood status as leverage against innocents who do not want to harm anyone; too often they pretend that everybody on one side of a racial divide is a victim and everybody on the other side is an oppressor. It’s a repackaging of a too-familiar “guilt trip,” as we used to say in the Sixties.

As for parents in most school districts, they’ve discovered they have little power to lose. But by confronting the people they vote onto school boards, they gain more.

Democracy proves itself as one method of holding the powerful to account.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

A Lesson for the Board

free speech, censorship, 1st Amendment

Shawn McBreairty has the right to speak at public school board meetings in Maine.

That may not sound like the most controversial of contentions, but many school boards and even the Justice Department have been treating parents as criminals for publicly objecting when schools 

  1. teach kids to feel racially guilty, 
  2. unlearn the biologically obvious about sex, and in general 
  3. engage in radical indoctrination at the expense of education.

The parents’ sin in such cases is that of nettling board members and others who want a free hand to inflict such policies.

Mr. McBreairty has gotten in hot water with more than one school board in Maine. The recent court ruling that he has the right to speak at board meetings was occasioned by the actions of the RSU 22 school district, which barred McBreairty from its own board meetings.

When he tried to attend one in June, the board used local police to stop him.

The judge in the case, Nancy Torreson, has no sympathy for the board’s antics, characterizing its rationale for trying to muzzle McBreairty as “evolving, ad hoc, and unsupported.”

Judge Torreson concludes that McBreairty’s expression of “school-related concerns at the podium during the public comment period of School Board meetings constitutes speech that is protected under the First Amendment.” Her ruling grants the motion for an order temporarily restraining the school board from stopping McBreairty from attending and speaking at its meetings.

Even if board members disagree with him.

McBreairty and the school board are in America, after all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Squelched in Quebec

Quebec, censorship, free speech, Covid

It’s a Université Laval thing; a Quebec thing: a Canada thing.

These are no places to be if you want to debate questions about pandemics and vaccines now “settled” by government-mandated consensus. Professors Patrick Provost and Nicolas Derome, who both teach at Laval, recently got the message in spades.

Provost, professor of microbiology and immunology, has been suspended for two months without pay for doubting the wisdom of giving COVID-19 vaccines to children. Kids face only a very low risk of serious consequences from the disease and a nonzero risk of being hurt by vaccination.

A newspaper that quoted his thoughts on the data and on free speech has cravenly deleted the offending article, stressing that “we can’t subscribe to” Provost’s views.

Laval also suspended Derome, professor of molecular biology, for expressing doubts about the value of vaccinating kids.

Canada’s authoritarians enjoy no monopoly on smothering academic and other speech. Many governments strive to more diligently repress their citizens. But Canadian officials fancy themselves pioneers in this area, and perhaps they are.

The hazards of squelching discourse about life-and-death matters should be obvious. It’s in our interest that scientists and everybody be able to freely investigate and discuss facts and interpretations without worrying whether an unauthorized assertion will cost the speaker two months of salary.

Or worse.

But some care nothing about logic and evidence — or, apparently, how useful these are to both individuals and to society at large.

It’s not an attitude consistent with . . . Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling government transparency

Parents Kept in the Dark

education, sexual orientation, teachers, parents, children

When does it become irresponsible to send children to a public school? 

Has the line been crossed in Fairfax County, Virginia?

Their school board now prohibits teachers from telling parents when children “change gender” or pretend to change gender. Such decisions may be evidenced by a student’s changing his name or by identifying as a member of the opposite sex or as “nonbinary” on a school’s learning portal.

The district is not inviting teachers to exercise discretion about whether to inform parents. One can imagine cases in which a teacher knows parents to be physically abusive and likely to come down on a kid like a ton of bricks if alerted to such an event.

Rather, the policy stipulates that parents needn’t ever be told about such matters. To the extent teachers obey, parents won’t know unless informed by the children themselves.

If you live in Fairfax County, you could protest.

And you could do other things, such as

  • attend school board meetings to object, as parents attended a Fairfax board meeting to object to the policy of suspending fourth-graders for using the “wrong” pronouns for classmates;
  • join the shadow board that parents have formed to criticize the doings of the Fairfax County board;
  • vote against a school board member or try to recall members — unless a judge decides that your recall petition fails to show “probable cause for removal.”

Or you could just get your kids the heck out of the public schools.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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After Recall, Revival

San Francisco, dumpster fire

Is San Francisco waking up from its dystopian nightmare?

The egalitarians who have pushed the great city into absurdity have suffered another setback.

The earlier victory for sanity was won in a landslide election this February when parents recalled three members of the local school board for doing things like renaming 44 schools to conform to a left-wing agenda, keeping San Francisco schools closed because of outsized fears of the pandemic, and using a lottery system to undermine the magnet school Lowell High.

The lottery ended Lowell’s merit-based admissions, preventing the most qualified students from getting in unless they happened to get a lucky number. A step was thus taken toward reducing all students in the district to the same low academic level. Obviously, kids too behind or lazy to be even good students let alone top students would not suddenly become stellar academicians merely by winning a lottery.

The three board members ousted in February were the only ones then eligible to be recalled. Now the reconstituted board has voted 4-3 against extending the lottery system. The vote restores merit-based admissions.

A victory, but way too narrow. One flipped vote and the district would be back to hobbling the best and brightest.

The three anti-education board members who voted against the best possible future for the best students are Kevine Boggess, Mark Sanchez, and Matt Alexander.

They should be recalled or at least defeated in their next election. Since district parents are on the alert and active, there’s a good chance that this will happen.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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