Tag Archives: education

It Isn’t Enough

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DoJ has filed suit against UCLA over the school’s overt antisemitic bigotry in the immediate and ensuing aftermath of Hamas’ atrocities inflicted on Israel 7 October 2023 and subsequently.

The school “engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination against Jewish and Israeli employees at UCLA…by failing to prevent and correct antisemitic workplace discrimination,” the complaint says. For all the incidents of anti-Jewish harassment, “not a single student, staff member, or faculty member was…formally disciplined for antisemitic behavior—including those who were arrested for illegal conduct.”

UCLA has lied about cleaning up its act:

UCLA said in a statement that the school had “taken concrete and significant steps to strengthen campus safety, enforce policies and combat antisemitism.”

The lie is demonstrated:

UCLA didn’t discipline or expel students for behavior that crossed into threats and harassment.

DoJ’s suit “asks,” according to the WSJ,

the school to stop tolerating a hostile work environment based on race, religion, and national origin.

If that’s an accurate summation and the extent of the call, it’s badly deficient. The personnel who perpetrated this bigotries would seem to remain in place. Any words they might fall past their lips or out of their keyboards claiming to stop such misbehaviors cannot be trusted given their empirically demonstrated bigotry. As part of any outcome of the suit—and there should be no settlement—these personnel must be fired for cause and any educator licenses they might possess be revoked with prejudice. Any students involved who are still present must be expelled with prejudice, and any since graduated must have their degrees rescinded, also with prejudice.

California Teacher Strikes

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More accurately, teacher union strikes in California.

A wave of teacher contracts is up for renegotiation now, thanks to a strategy the unions implemented a few years ago to synchronize expiration dates. Dozens of California school districts are in talks, with some already at an impasse or in mediation.
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By coordinating negotiations across the state with the threat of strikes, the unions aim to escalate funding battles from local school boards to the state legislature, said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, a union representing more than 300,000 educators. …
“This resets the power dynamic,” Goldberg said.

There’s this, too:

Total enrollment in the district has fallen by about 37% since 2018-19 to just over 390,000 students, officials say. Over that span, the number of teachers has held steady at around 25,500 while overall staffing has increased 15%.

Can you say “featherbedding,” boys and girls?

Kids’ public school education would suffer from a strike prolonged by school boards’ refusal to deal with unions “negotiating” in blatantly bad faith? How would anyone tell the difference? Kids in California already are afflicted by an education regime in those public school environments that’s so bad as to border on child abuse.

School boards need to screw their collective courage to the sticking post and tell the unions and their baldly excessive demands to go…pound sand.

Leftist School Districts Child Abuse

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When the Supreme Court ruled in Mahoud et al v Taylor et al, that schools may not prevent parents, via any means at all, from opting their children out of school events, including lessons, involving LGBTQ-related themes, here are Leftist-run schools and their Progressive-Democrat politicians deliberately ignoring that ruling and denying parents precisely that option.

  • Suburban Boston’s Lexington Public Schools refused to show parents curricula in advance while demanding they identify specific lessons for opting out, and claimed books that simply promote “tolerance” are exempt, according to a “Catch-22” lawsuit.
  • California Attorney General Rob Bonta [D] convinced a federal appeals court [the activist judge-dominated 9th Circuit] that forcing school districts to actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity was not covered by Mahmoud at all because it doesn’t involve “curricular decisions.”
  • Colorado’s Cherry Creek School District…us[ed] an old standby—lunch with a teacher—to discuss LGBTQ themes without parental approval.

It’s true that the Supreme Court ruling is a temporary injunction pending final adjudication of the underlying case as that case makes its way through the courts; however, it remains in effect, and from that it is the law of the land.

This is the lawlessness of the Left overlying their insistent child abuse with “sex” lessons far beyond their years and deliberately outside the children’s parents’ rights and obligations.

Cancel Culture of the Left

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon was scheduled to speak and interact with children and their parents via an appearance at McKinley Elementary School in Fairfield, CT. Within hours of DoEd’s announcement of the visit, the school canceled the visit. Fairfield Superintendent of Schools Michael Testani [ellipsis in the original]:

…we heard from many families who expressed concerns and shared that they were considering keeping their children home[.]

The editors of the Hearst Connecticut Media crowed:

The appearance was billed as part of the US Education Department’s “History Rocks Tour!” aspiring to visit all 50 states on America’s 250th anniversary.
History does rock. And on this day, Fairfield, Connecticut, was on the right side of history.

This would have been a excellent opportunity for the kids and their parents to have heard thoughts with which they’re not familiar (at least the kids are not) and to interact with, ask questions of, and express their own concerns to the leading government official overseeing so many facets of American education systems.

Instead, this is the school’s management team’s, backed by news opinionators, terror of folks of whom he disapproves saying things of which he disapproves.

The editors added this in their piece:

We don’t know precisely what concerns were expressed.

Nor do they know how many of those parents actually were concerned. Testani chose to not make that datum public, either.

That didn’t stop these worthies, though, from clutching their faux pearls and celebrating another “success” at avoiding hearing a differing opinion.

Universalized Choices of K-12 Schools

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Our public national education system—an inchoate agglomeration of local public school systems—is badly failing our children and through that badly failing our nation both in our economy and in our national security. Parochial schools, charter schools, voucher schools, homeschooling and pod-schooling (a pooling of homeschooler resources), which I’ll term choice schools—all of these do far better at educating our children than do those public schools, whether run by teacher unions or not. The ability to choose among those options is critical to our children’s education. The competition even produces improvements in the public schools. Hence, ESAs, Education Savings Accounts.

A limitation on ESAs is their funding. Formal funding for ESAs functionally caps their availability for students, with the result that vast numbers of students can’t get into one; the ESA program for their area has expended all of its funds before the enrollment lists got to them. The Wall Street Journal‘s editors propose a solution:

To create truly universal programs, states can remove enrollment caps and fund ESAs outside of annual appropriations…. They can boost scholarship amounts….

More money isn’t necessary. More money would help, even if it is government money, provided it’s allocated and spent wisely—but it would be government money.

More money could be made available for ESAs, if only indirectly, though, not by increasing spending but by allocating existing education dollars to the student rather than to the school district. In this way, when a parent moves his child out of the public school and into a choice school, the money would follow the student to that choice school, defraying the cost of attending that alternative school.

Other mechanisms for supporting school choice also are available. These include State governments removing such barriers to choice as caps on the number of charter or voucher schools allowed to exist in a jurisdiction, forcing homeschooling parents into teacher unions, limiting use of under-used or empty public school facilities by choice schools, onerous licensing and accreditation requirements for choice schools—even caps on the number of students allowed into an ESA program.