Tag Archives: education

Teachers Union Disinformation

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In response to a collection of education-related laws recently enacted in Florida, Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said in his news release,

This new law grossly oversteps in trying to silence teachers, staff, professors, and most other public employees. We will not go quietly….

Here’s some of what those silencing laws do:

  • allow teachers to require students to hand over their phones at the beginning of class
  • ban the use of TikTok on school Wi-Fi and networks
  • does not allow students to use school internet to access social media (with some exceptions)
  • block classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity for all grades
  • bar availability of certain sexual books in school libraries
  • prevent students and teachers from being required to use certain pronouns
  • prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in state colleges
  • allow teachers to leave school unions for any reason
  • State budget provides an increase in teacher pay—fourth year in a row

Not misinformation—disinformation. Go quietly, or go noisily, but maybe Florida’s teachers unions need to go. Let the teachers themselves form new unions from the ground up, or not, at the teachers’ own discretion.

Higher Ed Administrators and Values

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Phil Murphy, has decided to intervene, nakedly, on the side of unions in a labor dispute between Rutgers faculty and Rutgers administrators.

Rutgers faculty walked off the job Monday after three employee unions launched a strike. The move has left classrooms empty….

Under New Jersey law, university administrators can go into State court and get an injunction forcing an end to the strike and a resumption/continuation of negotiations. Murphy has stepped in, though, and told the administrators “don’t you dare.” Murphy’s diktat isn’t, strictly speaking, enforceable, but Murphy does control 20% of Rutgers’ state funding, and he appoints the majority of its board.

As the WSJ editorial put it,

…administrators are now under political pressure to cave.

Not entirely, though. They could force Murphy’s hand by going to court anyway. These administrators just have to decide which they value more: their personal jobs or the Rutgers students and their ability to get the education they’re paying princely sums for.

Those administrators’ actions will make their values obvious, regardless of how they might characterize their choice.

A String’s Attached

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President Joe Biden (D) and his DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona are trying to rewrite the Title IX statute to bar States from categorically ban[ning] transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Never mind that the actual statute, enacted those decades ago, is explicitly designed to give women a fair and reasonably equal opportunity to play sports: if a State school or a local school district has a men’s program, that school or district must fund and provide for a substantially similar program for women.

Now the Biden/Cardona DoEd is proposing a rule that would ignore the sex-based Title IX statute and require biological men be allowed to compete in women’s sports in those schools that get Federal funding.

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are[.]

Never mind that a transgender woman is a man by his biology, by his genes, by his XY chromosome pair.

Never mind that a transgender man is a woman by her biology, by her genes, by her XX chromosome pair.

This is the Biden administration’s open war on women.

My advice to the States: don’t take the Federal funds. The strings attached are more like chains.

Grooming

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A woman, a mother of five children already, and a devout Christian, living in Oregon, tried to adopt two more children. Tried, and was denied by the State.

According to Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the state’s adoption application requires that potential parents “respect, accept, and support…the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of children.

The woman, already well into Oregon’s adoption process, then was required to attend explicit training to ensure she effected ODHS’ requirement. She advised them she could not attend; it violated her Christian beliefs, especially concerning the number of sexes extant in humans.

It gets worse. According to the lawsuit the woman filed last Monday,

Oregon’s Resource and Adoptive Family (RAFT) training [the woman was required to] attend[] urged potential parents to “use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or sign the child up for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots.”

Assuming the lawsuit’s claim is even remotely accurate, how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?

Nor is Oregon alone. There’s the Broward County (Florida) Public Schools board. Board member Brenda Fam at a recent board meeting put some questions to her fellow board members that her constituent parents had asked her regarding the board’s proposed sex education curriculum.

They want to know what the definition of a woman is for sexual education curriculum in Broward County. They want to know what individuals can get pregnant and what individuals can give birth.

The district’s Superintendent, Earlean Smiley:

They want to know what the definition of what a woman is in the sexual education curriculum for Broward County. That question is more than a question. It is a thought process, it’s an examination, a lot of laws based on a lot of things.
I guess I’m procrastinating and hesitating because there is no clear-cut answer I can give you at this point[.]

Fellow board member Sarah Leonardi:

This curriculum, the policy, the support guide, the goal of all of us being here is to support children and to educate children. And not to engage in a political line of questioning that distracts from that mission. I just think it’s very important that we stick to the purpose of, again, the curriculum, the policy, the support guide, which is to support children and not get distracted by other agendas.

No, the questions are quite simple and straightforward, and the biology underlying the questions is just as straightforward. It isn’t “a thought process,” it isn’t an “examination;” the biology of the matter perfectly straightforward. Nor is it “other agendas;” the other agendas, “the politics,” center on this board’s efforts to blur physiology, to disguise the ideological nature of the board’s—and the Superintendent’s—intended “teachings” and to hide all of that from the parents.

Here, too, I ask:  how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?

“Ladies” is a Microaggression

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A highly qualified educator was offered a position as Superintendent of Easthampton Schools, in Massachusetts. Then he committed the unpardonable and heinous crime of addressing, in an email, the school board’s Chairwoman Cynthia Kwiecinski and Executive Assistant Suzanne Colby as “Ladies.”

Those ladies promptly rescinded the board’s offer as a result of that courtesy. It seems that simple, courteous salutations of respect are now microaggressions in those…persons’…fetid imaginations.

[The unhired educator Vito] Perrone said Kwiecinski told him that using “ladies” as a greeting was hostile and derogatory and that “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem,'” he told the [Daily Hampshire] Gazette, adding that she also reprimanded him for using “ladies” as a microaggression.

Perrone’s reaction:

I was shocked. I grew up in a time when “ladies” and “gentlemen” was a sign of respect. I didn’t intend to insult anyone.

Nor did he insult anyone, or at least anyone worth taking seriously. The only ones insulted here are two folks in authority who spend their energy looking for ways to be offended rather than on ways to better educate the children of Easthampton.

Perrone dodged a bullet when that job offer was rescinded; Kwiecinski and Colby demonstrated very clearly the Precious and wrongly focused environment into which he almost stumbled.