Tag Archives: education

A Teachers Union Rebellion

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The Chicago Pubic Schools district intends to reopen kindergarten through 8th grade for in-class schooling and in-person teaching on 1 February. To that end, the teachers were required to show up for work last Monday to prepare for the reopening.

The Chicago Teachers Union refused.

The union’s excuse was their holding of

the clear and present danger that [in-person classes and teaching] poses to the health of our families and school communities.

This, of course, is nothing more than an exercise in power for power’s sake and a preliminary round leading to demands for more money. The “clear and present danger” has long since been debunked. Children are the least likely to get sick from the Wuhan Virus, both in relative terms and in absolute, and those that do carry the virus are extremely unlikely to spread it, either among themselves or to adults.

The CTU badly wants decertification and the rebellious teachers fired for cause.

The only question is whether Chicago’s management has the moral courage to do so. Sadly for the kids, that’s doubtful.

Controls

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Governments at the State level (look for this to become nationalized under the Biden administration) are trying to force high school students and their families to give up to those State governments (and potentially to the Federal government) their families’ financial condition as a condition of graduating from high school.

Notice that. Petty academic considerations no longer would be sufficient criteria for graduating from a supposedly academic facility. Letting Government peer into private wallets and purses are about to become a primary criterion for fitness to graduate.

The rationalization for this invasion is to guide more high school students toward college. (I’ll elide, in this post, the idea that college isn’t for everyone; a significant fraction—possibly a majority—of high school seniors would be much better off in a trade school or community college learning a trade.)

The government preferred financial record to be executed, according to these governments, is the FAFSA form—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—which gives access to government academic grants. In Florida, high school seniors who eschewed the FAFSA form missed out on $100 million in Federal Pell grants, for instance.

What’s not discussed in these coming mandates is that the form also gives government access to our bank account contents. If the goal is to guide more high school students toward college, an alternative answer is for high schools, their districts, and the State and Federal governments to do a better job of publicizing the plethora of Federal (and State, etc) grants and other funding sources. That publicity does not need letting governments to peer into private accounts to achieve.

That alternative is so plain that questions arise regarding why Governments choose not to consider it.

A Training Opportunity

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Ramstein AB, Germany, location of USAFE headquarters, got an emergency alarm over the weekend of an in-progress missile attack on the base. The alarm turned out to be false.

There are a couple of ways such a false alarm might be triggered. One is that the alarm was part of an exercise and the exercise label simply dropped or missed. Another is that, as part of a Russian exercise, by happenstance in also progress, missiles were launched at exercise targets inside Russia during that exercise’s final phase, and detection systems acted on the fact and a short time later (but after the alarm had been sent) recognized the launches for what they were and canceled the alarm.

In any event, as “a Pentagon official” said,

It’s important that we find out what happened, for a lot of reasons. We don’t want people getting needlessly alarmed, and we don’t want them to be complacent in the face of a genuine alert.

“Ramstein officials” also noted

Today, the Ramstein Air Base Command Post was notified via an alert notification system of a real-world missile launch in the European theater.  The Command Post followed proper procedure and provided timely and accurate notifications to personnel in the Kaiserslautern Military Community.

And in response to the alarm, those officials said,

Those who heard the warning took it seriously.

Which raises another important aspect of the false alarm: the real-world operational training opportunity the alarm presented to the base and the surrounding Kaiserslautern Military Community. Finding out what happened regarding the transmittal of a false alarm should include a detailed, critical post mortem on the base and community response to the fact of the alarm. That post mortem also should include an assessment of why less than everyone heard the alarm.

I Have to Wonder

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The administrators of Presentation College Carlow, an Irish college a bit south of Dublin, told the female students there

not to wear tight clothing that could “distract” staff members….
[or] revealing clothing, including tracksuit bottoms and gym leggings.

I wonder: why does this school have so many supposedly adult men on its staff who are so easily and pruriently distracted? Or, since the school’s students are as young as 12 years old, why are so many seeming pedophiles on staff?

It’s a concern shared by the students’ parents.

A petition called the policy sexist and noted that male students’ attire was not discussed.
…
“This is appalling, majority of students are 12-18 years old and should not feel [sic] sexualised by their teachers who they are meant to feel safe around,” [the petition] continues.

And

[A parent] told local media outlets that adult male teachers should not be distracted by young girls in the first place.

Indeed.

Racism in K-12 Schools

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It’s rampant in the San Diego Unified School District, even as it claims to be “combatting racism.”

Students will no longer be graded based on a yearly average, or on how late they turn in assignments. …
… Board members say the changes are part of a larger effort to combat racism.

Because most of the poor grades went to minority students, and figuring out why that might be and fixing the underlying problem(s) isn’t something for an educational institution to concern itself with.

Things like turning work in on time and classroom behavior will now instead count towards a student’s citizenship grade, not their academic grade.

Because academic discipline has no relationship with academics. Nor does any other sort of discipline. Nor is there any interest in figuring out why there might be poor discipline and addressing those underlying problems. (Aside: There also seems to be no interest in the poor grammar of journalists.)

Nor are any consequences or rewards associated with feel-good ratings like “citizenship.” Especially in a public school system that doesn’t teach the civics of citizenship.

This is nonsense.

This is a matter of the school system deciding to not do the work of bringing minority children up to speed so they can compete.

This is a matter of San Diego thinking either that minority children are inherently inferior and simply can’t compete, and their deficiency must be papered over, or of San Diego thinking minority children just aren’t worth the effort, and the district’s laziness must be papered over.

This is the bigotry (I don’t agree that it’s in any way soft) of low expectations at its most insidious.