Tag: education

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education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Woke Board Broke

San Francisco, school board, recall

The pro-education, anti-indoctrination counterrevolution is chalking up a major win in . . . San Francisco?

Homeschooling — or at least private-school schooling — sounds better every day. Pandemic-rationalized permanent shutdowns of classrooms, along with the accelerating ideological assaults that many school boards are waging on behalf of gender fluidity, racist “antiracism,” regimented speech, etc., do more than merely suggest we find alternatives.

Yet, for one reason or another, many families are stuck with public schools.

But they are apparently not stuck with the very worst that public schools can impose. Last Tuesday, in the first recall election in San Francisco in some 40 years, fed-up parents threw giant butterfly nets over three local school-board malefactors and dragged them off stage: Alison Collins, Gabriela López, and Faauuga Moliga.

Instead of working to reopen schools, the board’s been busy these last couple of years killing merit-based admissions at the magnet school Lowell High, scrubbing the names of dozens of schools to get rid of such blighted appellations as “Abraham Lincoln” and “George Washington,” and spending a million bucks to repaint a mural of the life of Washington. Last year, the district’s budget deficit swelled to around $125 million.

After the votes came in, other educrats in town scurried to the defense of the downfallen trio and prayed that their replacements would consist of more of the same.

But what parents can do once, they can do again, and not just in San Francisco. 

Kids, shake their hands. Your moms and dads are cool.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom too much government

The Young and the Unmasked

your rulers, your child, masks, Covid

It wouldn’t surprise me if Tiffany McHugh, former director of the Foothills Christian Church Preschool in San Diego, wishes now that she had been running a preschool in a slack state like Florida.

Florida doesn’t penalize such malefaction.

It doesn’t even prohibit it. Yes, things have gotten pretty bad in states like Florida. They let the two-year-olds breathe: unthinkable! The policymakers in these states apparently labor under the presumption that the COVID-19 pandemic is not Bubonic Plague 2.0 and that, for kids, the risk of serious COVID-19 disease has always been very low.

Well, in California they take these risks seriously!!!!!!!

The Golden State’s Department of Social Services has shut down the preschool McHugh was directing and pulled her license. The problem? She couldn’t get the tykes to stay masked.

“There were a lot of children who were just too young to wear masks,” McHugh confesses,“they pull them off. It’s really difficult.”

This makes it sound as if she didn’t even try handcuffing the kids so that they could not remove their masks. Talk about dereliction of duty.

Other area preschools have not been similarly targeted, and so many suspect selective enforcement. But hold on. When you’re going after flouters of regulations, somebody has to be brought to book first. 

Rest assured, all other San Diego and California preschools will be outlawed momentarily.

McHugh’s school has appealed the decision to ban her forlife from working with children. The hearing will be held on February 11.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling

School Boards Withdraw

Merrick Garland, School Board, censorship

Several state school board associations are withdrawing from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). And doing so pointedly. 

Why? 

Because of the NSBA’s September letter to President Biden characterizing the many protests by upset parents across the country as “domestic terrorism.”

Those protests are ample evidence of the growing discontent with the injection of racist “critical race theory” (CRT) into K-12 classes. In addition to calling the avalanche of complaints a form of “domestic terrorism,” the NSBA claimed that the CRT agenda “is not taught in public schools.” 

This was met with widespread (and justified) incredulity. The NSBA claimed that CRT was not being taught because college-level texts purveying CRT aren’t used in K-12 classes. Nevertheless, teachers had been instructed, workshops had been conducted, and students had been lectured and censured — all in CRT lore and dogma.

The NSBA later unpersuasively apologized for “some of the language” of their previous letter without repudiating its main contentions or the CRT indoctrination.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued no apology for using the original NSBA letter to rationalize establishing a task force to investigate parents.

The statement of the Ohio School Boards Association public sums up the sentiments of the state organizations leaving the NSBA: “OSBA believes strongly in the value of parental and community discussion at school board meetings and we reject the labeling of parents as domestic terrorists.”

Parents Defending Education reports that as of mid-November, some 26 state school board associations have “distanced themselves” from the letter. Fifteen have formally withdrawn their memberships.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

The Freedom to Say “Jesus”

Brian Hickman, religion, freedom, dance

Some people have it tough to begin with. Then others make their lives even tougher for no good reason.

Fifth-grader Brian Hickman has cerebral palsy. Inspired by his mother, Adriana, he doesn’t let it keep him down.

His resilience has recently been tested. One of the things Brian loves to do is dance, and he spent weeks preparing for a talent show at his elementary school. 

Then the school said no.

He wanted to dance to “We Shine,” a contemporary Christian song that mentions Jesus. In accordance with the school district, administrators told him he couldn’t use it. 

Too offensive.

The principal opined that permitting the song would violate “separation of church and state.”

Well, “separation of church and state” is a term of art for what is in the Constitution: the right to free exercise of religion, and a prohibition on establishing a state church.

Letting Brian dance to his preferred music could not have resulted in the imposition of a prayer schedule on the citizenry, in forcing Episcopalians to become Lutherans or vice versa, or in otherwise coercively establishing religion.

No, officials were merely consulting their own sensibilities and deciding that they or the students could not abide exposure to Christian sentiments. Since Brian likes only Christian songs, any alternate he might have come up with would probably also have been refused.

But why make him start from scratch anyway?

His mother knew what to do: enlist the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, which promptly filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District. Which promptly reversed course and let Brian dance to the music he wanted.

Case closed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom government transparency

Virginia is for Parents?

McAuliffe, Youngkin, Virginia, Governor, education

Virginia’s governor’s race offers 2021’s biggest prize. Might the outcome of the contest between former Governor Terry McAuliffe, the old Clinton pal, and Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin, portend partisan momentum going into 2022? 

In just the last dozen years or so, my adopted commonwealth has mutated politically from “Deep Red to Solid Blue.” There is, the FiveThirtyEight polling website explains, “a 13-election winning streak for Democrats in Virginia statewide races since 2012.” Though the McAuliffe/Youngkin race is “somewhat likelier to result in a Democratic victory,” it “could go either way.”

The biggest flashpoint? McAuliffe’s statement at the final debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

I quoted that last week in “Burning Down the House.” But in a comment, a reader named Doug argued that I was “taking McAuliffe’s comment totally out of context.” 

Now, McAuliffe’s words had been widely reported in precisely the fashion I had placed them, so I felt comfortable. But I had not listened to the entire exchange, specifically to what McAuliffe was responding. So I listened.

“What we have seen over the course of the last 20 months,” Youngkin told the debate audience, “is our school systems refusing to engage with parents.” Noting how he had spoken with parents upset about “sexually explicit material,” Youngkin charged that McAuliffe “vetoed the bill that would have informed parents” about those materials.

“I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education,” concluded Youngkin.

In response, McAuliffe called Youngkin “clueless” and then famously dissed parents.

“School boards are best positioned,” McAuliffe wrote in vetoing that 2016 legislation, “to ensure that our students are exposed to those appropriate literary and artistic works that will expand students’ horizons and enrich their learning experiences.”

Whether their parents like it or not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights

Combatting Campus Cancel Culture

education, wisdom, cancel culture

We keep hearing how students and professors are being targeted for saying stuff they’re not supposed to say — from the perspective of the hard-left students, professors, and off-campus third parties who launch most of the attacks, that is.

Which seem to be happening more and more often.

The numbers confirm it. New research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) indicates that attacks on professors for impolitic speech have increased since 2015. Most of the attacks — 74 percent — have resulted in sanctions against the accused.

According to FIRE, “calls for sanction” of a professor rose from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020.

Three fourths of the tallied incidents, 314 out of 426, have led to punishments like suspension or termination.

The attacks tend to occur on university campuses with “severely speech-restrictive” policies. Like many Ivy League schools.

One of the researchers, Komi German, says that university administrators and presidents must “explicitly state that the protection of free speech and academic inquiry supersedes protection from words that are perceived as offensive.”

Good idea. Let them do that.

Why aren’t the censorious administrators doing it already, though? 

Probably because they lack allegiance to the value of freedom of speech on campus.

Until these academics all have Damascus-level conversions, parents and students must do what they can themselves to discourage these censorious policies. This means, abstaining from attending and paying tuition at schools that penalize professors and others for wrongspeech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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local leaders

Political Intimidation Unmasked

mask, child, children, student

Last week, Illinois state regulators threatened Dr. Jeremy Henrichs with “personal and professional consequences,” specifically loss of his medical license, if he continued to oppose mandatory mask-wearing in schools.

Henrichs is a board of education member and a medical doctor.

He questioned the necessity of masks. Why? On the basis of his best medical judgment — and he is hardly alone in seeing good reasons to oppose mask mandates, especially for children. In response, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation “has threatened my medical licensure unless I expressly support and enforce a mask mandate for all students.”

In his public protest, Henrichs added that it’s bad for democracy when people tolerate this kind of intimidation.

Fortunately, in this particular case the intimidation is not being tolerated, for state lawmakers called for hearings on the matter.

The agency that threatened Dr. Henrichs soon apologized, apparently ending the threat to him. (According to the letter of apology, though, the complaint won’t be formally closed until the Medical Disciplinary Board meets on September 1.)

In addition, the entire Mahomet-Seymour school board of which Henrichs is a member has signed an op-ed defending him.

Their op-ed argues that board members should be “free to express their opinions, debate with their colleagues . . . and vote their conscience without the threat of coercion. . . .”

So it’s looking good for Dr. Henrichs. But power-holders with censorious mentalities are still out there, eager to crack down on speech with which they disagree.

Whenever they can get away with it. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling general freedom

Handicapping the Best

Harrison Bergeron, egalitarianism, equality

The year was 2081, and everyone was finally equal.

That’s the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story about how everybody with above-average intelligence, looks, or talent is chronically handicapped, by law. To enforce equality.

“Harrison Bergeron” is satire. Vonnegut exaggerates and invents. Our world will never be like the world he depicts.

But not for lack of trying.

The latest episode ripe for satire? The decision of the Vancouver School Board to kill honors programs to enforce “equity.” 

What is that?

Don’t bother using an old dictionary.

Today, equity is a code word for bringing everybody down to the same low level in defiance of the real differences in abilities among students — not to mention effort expended.

The board had already killed English honors programs. Now it’s killing science and math honors programs. To foster “an inclusive model of education.”

Jennifer Katz, professor at University of British Columbia, accuses parents angry about the decision of supporting “systemic racism.”

My family has been subjected to this mentality. Years ago, my daughter was advanced in math, way ahead of other first-graders at a private school. My wife asked the teachers to give her some more difficult problems in addition to what the class was doing so that she wouldn’t die of boredom.

Answer: “No.” Reason: “Then she would be even further ahead.”

We never took our daughter back to that school. How could we? How could we knowingly keep her in a place where she would be allowed to stagnate for the “greater good” of keeping people “equal”?

Whether in my state of Virginia or in Vancouver, British Columbia, children should be free to learn, to progress. Let’s keep Vonnegut’s work fiction, not prophecy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron (2013)

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education and schooling ideological culture

Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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family / mind / JG

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education and schooling initiative, referendum, and recall

Organizing an Ouster

Learning Under

Despite everything, public schooling can help kids learn some important things.

But this schooling is also something that kids have to survive. If and when Johnny can’t add, spell, figure out who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, or relate premises to a conclusion — the lessons and educational theories he’s been subjected to often have something to do with it.

Now Johnny is being told, if his skin is white, that he must feel guilty about his skin color and work to find, dwell on, and exterminate super-subtle racism buried deep within his privileged soul. He can’t just be happy and learn.

The rationale for this assault on the individual is called “critical race theory.” And in some school districts, this mislabeled “antiracist” indoctrination is being imposed on students (as it is also being imposed throughout society).*

Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, are fighting back by forming a PAC with the mission of ejecting purveyors of critical race theory from the school board. The PAC is led by Ian Prior, who says that county parents “cannot wait until 2023 to elect new leaders.”

Board members must be recalled because of the board’s failure to reopen schools, its imposition of “dangerously divisive critical race theory,” and its cooperation with “tactics designed to intimidate students, parents and teachers from exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Good luck, parents. 

And if you can find a way to educate your kids without sending them to public schools, I suggest that you consider that alternative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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* “On April 19, 2021, the Biden Administration proposed a rule,” alerts Heritage Action, “that would allow the Department of Education to prioritize recipients to receive K-12 grants if they include critical race theory in their curriculum.” The Federal Register is accepting public comments on the proposed rule here until May 19.

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