Tag Archives: education

“We Cannot Read…”

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…every book we make available in our libraries…. This is the claim—and he’s actually serious—by Andrew Cluley, Ann Arbor School District spokesperson, in response to queries concerning why his K-12 libraries are blithely adding gender- and “white supremacy”-oriented books to their stacks. The librarians do, supposedly, read the reviews and descriptions carefully.

It’s possibly true—remotely so—that librarians are unable to read, beforehand, all of their book selections to high school libraries. Maybe, though, the school district’s high school librarians should slow down their library additions so they can read their additions, and not simply rely on reviews and descriptions written by others. Firsthand knowledge instead of secondhand claims.

However. How much time does it take to read a grade school book before adding it? What are those librarians doing with their district-paid time that prevents them from personally vetting the books they’re personally adding to their stacks?

Public School Ownership

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In an op-ed centered on the question of who owns institutions of higher education like universities, Richard Vedder, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, identified seven categories of people who claim ownership of these institutions:

  • The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.
  • The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.
  • The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.
  • The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.
  • The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.
  • The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.
  • The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.

I have thoughts.

Board members are charged with organizational governing oversight, but they own nothing, except through personally funded stakes. Board members serve at the pleasure of the school’s owners.

Politicians, acting through the governments of which they’re a part, so long as they’re duly elected or appointed by those duly elected, do act in an ownership capacity vis-à-vis public colleges and universities, and they hire and fire employees like board members—and administrators and faculty—as they see fit. The same capacity is held by private institutions’ owners: partners; private share holders; in the case of publicly traded schools, those shareholders; and religious institutions regarding their parochial schools.

Administrators, like board members, own nothing in their capacity of administrators. They’re employees of the school’s owners, hired to conduct the day-to-day administration of the school within the framework established by the board—and the school’s owners.

Faculty claiming ownership only demonstrate their own self-absorbed arrogance. They’re employees, nothing more.

Students claiming ownership are showing their own, even deeper, obliviousness, an ignorance fostered by those same faculty members. Students are customers of the school. Full stop.

Alumni are even further removed from any trace of ownership, except in the depths of their own fetid imaginations. They’re ex-students, and nothing more, no matter the size of their fiscal donations.

Accrediting agencies claiming ownership is risible on its face. That’s like raters like a Moody’s or auditors like a Deloitte claiming ownership of the companies they’re rating or auditing.

It Takes a Village?

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One is trying to come for the children of Idaho (among other places).

School districts throughout Idaho have been adopting policies to keep parents in the dark about their children’s gender identity and sexual orientation at the instruction of the Idaho School Boards Association (ISBA), according to school district policies and email correspondence obtained through FOIA requests by Parents Defending Education, which were shared with Fox News Digital.
Policies adopted on “Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation” in the Buhl, Challis, Marsh Valley, Middleton, and Wilder school districts say an employee could be demoted or even fired for violating a student’s confidentiality on LGBTQ issues.

The village will raise our children; all we parents are for is getting children for village use.

No, it doesn’t take a village to use raise our children. It takes parents, ideally, two of them, to raise our children, and it takes parents to bring our children to the moral and religious state that John Adams so rightly said our republic desperately needs for survival.

Mistaken?

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In a Fox News article centered on Congressman Chip Roy’s (D, TX) proposed legislation that would bar Federal funds from going to schools that teach critical race theory (the foolishness doesn’t deserve capitalization), Cato Institute’s Colleen Hroncich had this in objecting to Roy’s proposal:

For starters, the federal government has no constitutional role in education[.]

Plainly, the Federal government does have a role, Constitutional or otherwise, in education—hence the existence of those federal funds to schools that Roy’s proposal would block.

Alternatively, Hroncich is correct, and all Federal funds transfers to schools should stop.

“Society’s” Needs

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Linn-Mar Community School Board (the district is on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids, IA) member Rachel Wall thinks she knows more about what “society’s needs” are and what should be taught “society’s” children than those children’s parents do. She posted—and she was deadly serious—on Facebook

The purpose of a public ed is to not teach kids what the parents want. It is to teach them what society needs them to know. The client is not the parent, but the community[.]

That got her enough public pushback, including calls for her resignation, that Wall added a post that she actually insisted was clarifying:

This post has garnered much ire and although I thought the sentiment was clear, it is obvious that’s not the case. Please allow me to clarify. This post doesn’t say that parents don’t matter or that students don’t matter. It doesn’t say that parents shouldn’t be involved or that students shouldn’t be our focus. What it says is that public education is an ecosystem.

Public education is an ecosystem. And she gets to define who the members of her ecosystem are. They plainly do not include the parents. Parents are not, in her exalted view, part of society. Notice, too, that while Wall doesn’t say that parents and students don’t matter, she also doesn’t say that they do matter.

She’ll hear politely what parents say, and then she’ll proceed without further regard. Children are not to be educated, they’re merely tools with which Wall and her cronies intend to mold their version of community. That status as mere tool, of course, makes the children her focus. Who uses a tool without focusing on it?

Please allow me to clarify. Parents are society. Their children are tomorrow’s society. No one is better suited to determine the needs of society today and tomorrow than society’s members: parents today and tomorrow and today’s children grown into tomorrow.

All teachers are qualified to teach is the mechanics of how to operate in society—STEM materials—how we got here—the facts of history—and how we’ll interact with each other—political history and current civics.

Sadly, dangerously, teachers of Wall’s ilk are unqualified even for that, and district managers like Wall are unqualified for anything related to our children.