Federal Intimidation

The Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden now is trying to cow school districts into pushing Progressive-Democratic Party gender identity and sexual orientation ideology by threatening to withhold Federal funding from the districts’ free and reduced-price school lunch programs.

This is Party using children as hostage in its push for that destructive claptrap. Those programs often provide the only healthy meal those children get in a school day, and denying those children is a blatant attempt to intimidate those districts into compliance with Party ideology. Party’s ransom demand is the surrender of those children to Party diktat.

Not Radicalized

Recall the…incident…a few days ago in which a Hillcrest High School teacher was terrorized, solely for her support of Israel during the current Hamas-instigated war against Israel, and driven into a locked room for her own protection when 400 of the high school’s students rioted and targeted her, threatening to kill her, while waving Palestinian flags.

New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks is vociferously denying that those students were radicalized; he’s insisting, instead, that

This is a really good school with wonderful young people. And I’m so taken aback by this notion that these kids are terrorists…or radicalized.

Who Needs Knowledge?

Plainly not teachers union teachers, at least according to the union. The New Jersey Progressive-Democratic Party-run State legislature agrees with them, too, which says volumes about the contempt Party has for ordinary Americans.

A major New Jersey education union is pushing Democratic Governor Phil Murphy to sign a bill into law that would eliminate the basic skills test requirement to become a teacher in the state.
The New Jersey Senate and state Assembly passed a bill in June that would allow the State Education Board to issue an alternative certificate to a teacher candidate who meets all eligibility requirements except for the requirement to achieve a minimum basic reading, writing and math skills test score.

91%

That’s the outcome of a Freedom Economy Index survey of 70,000 small businesses, of whom 905 responded, producing a survey with a 3% margin of error and a 95% confidence interval for the outcome.

And having delayed the lede, here is that outcome.

Fully two-thirds of the respondents think college graduates have educations that are useless to business needs, and another quarter of them think those graduates don’t have very useful educations. Here are some of the comments from respondents, which the survey reported verbatim:

  • The Talent shortage will just get worse because high schools and colleges produce no talent.

Selfish

And from that, a Texas bill that would create universal/State-wide school choice—paid for by Education Savings Accounts of $10,500 per K-12 student—is on the brink of failure to pass. Much progress has been made, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott (R) having convened a special session of the Texas legislature for the purpose. However, here we are on the last day of that session (as I write), and the failure brink is caused by a few rural Republican representatives.

The bill would let any Texas parent withdraw his student child from a public school that parent deemed unsuitable or failing to educate his son or daughter and transfer him/her to a different school (typically charter, voucher, or private) more to his liking.

Intrinsically Inferior

The Oregon State Board of Education has waived, essentially, all high school graduation requirements—demonstrated competency in reading, writing or math—and is allowing anyone and everyone who had the initiative simply to enroll in a high school to graduate with a high school diploma.

Board members said the standards…harmed marginalized students since higher rates of students of color, students with disabilities, and students learning English as a second language ended up having to take the extra step to prove they deserved a diploma, The Oregonian reported.

Don’t Take that Federal Money

That’s what Tennessee is considering regarding Federal education funding transfers—$1.8 billion worth, especially since the money comes with mandates and other strings. Breaking the addiction to Federal dollars will sting: Tennessee has collected some $14.85 billion in its own tax revenues through August of this year, which projects to about $22.28 billion for the year; those $1.8 billion represent about 8% of Tennessee’s domestic income.

To see if such a rejection is “feasible,”

“Employment Violence”

Boston University has laid off some 15 staffers of the university’s Center for Antiracist Research. BU’s School of Social Work Clinical Assistant Professor and faculty lead for education and training at the Center for Antiracist Research, Phillipe Copeland, claims that’s violence.

This act of employment violence and trauma is not just about individual leaders. It’s about the cultures and systems that allow it to occur. And too often rewards it. Antiracism is not a branding exercise, PR campaign or path to self-promotion. It is a life and death matter[.]

Firing a Teacher

A Cobb County Georgia elementary school teacher was terminated by the school’s school board for reading a book centered on gender identity to her fifth-grade students. The book feature[d] a nonbinary character and challenge[d] the concept that there are only two genders. Such books are barred from elementary school instruction under Georgia’s Divisive Concepts Law that prohibits teachers from using controversial topics in their instruction. The school district also argued that the teacher, with her reading, violated three district policies.

The firing came after an investigative three-person tribunal had sided with the teacher, recommending that she keep her job. Of course, the teacher and her lawyer are crying politics over the firing. The lawyer, Craig Goodmark:

Why Johnny Can’t Read

An increasing number of States are looking at passing laws blocking third-graders who can’t read (well enough) from being passed on to fourth grade.

Tennessee, Michigan, and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests and laws requiring students to repeat third grade to improve literacy. Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and Nevada have all passed similar laws that will go into effect in the coming years.

Those laws, too, typically include extra tutoring, summer school, and…teacher training (what a concept that last is).