Tag Archives: education

Opening Schools—Two Schools of Thought

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has ordered all schools—private and public—not to open until his Omnipotent State declares it safe to do so. This seems at the behest of California’s teachers unions, which fear competition from private schools—and which are losing that competition, as they’ve been doing for some years.

Catholic school tuition, for instance, costs $1,000-$4,000 per student less than the union public schools, and they provide better education—academic, discipline, moral values. And they’re ready, willing, and anxious to open on schedule.

In contrast, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (D) has sprung some of his discretionary education funds to cover school costs for families whose kids went to private schools last year, but for whom the Wuhan Virus situation has hammered their finances this year.

What’s really at stake? The virus risk to the kids in K-12 is vanishingly small: they’re simply unlikely to get infected, and among those who do, the severity of their infection very usually is slight.

The science is uncertain on how infectious the kids are when they are infected but asymptomatic. They appear not to be mutually infectious; the uncertainty is how infectious they are to the adults around them, the teachers, teacher aides (a relatively recent, and seeming featherbedding, addition to staff), administrators and staff, janitors. The data, though, are leaning increasingly in the direction of not very infectious.

There are occasional moves to stagger in-person schooling with half the students present some days, the other half the other days, at socially distanced desks, and with virtual schooling (a disastrous failure last spring, but maybe practice teaches) for the kids at home on those alternate days.

This is unnecessary. The kids are as safe from each other with the Wuhan Virus as they are with colds and flu. Bring them back.  All of them.

While the risks remain uncertain, it would be cumbersome but easily and straightforwardly doable to socially distance the teachers from the students in their classrooms. They spend a fair amount of their class time on the chalkboards at the front of the rooms, anyway. Or could easily go back to that.

Teachers unions holding out for deus ex cashina (I wish I’d thought of the term, but it’s the WSJ editors’) State and Federal interventions are acting in their petty interests rather than the interests of our children. Easier said than done, but these unions need to be decertified. Their selfish greed borders on child abuse.

Foolishness

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The United Teachers Los Angeles union put out a paper earlier this month, and among the union’s claims is this one”

Police violence is a leading cause of death and trauma for Black people, and is a serious public health and moral issue.

Wow.

There are thousands of blacks killed or traumatized and families traumatized by other blacks every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

Thousands of black babies murdered in the womb every year. Police violence causes more black deaths and trauma than that?

The UTLA is insulting the intelligence of all of us with this…foolishness. The UTLA is especially demonstrating its soft bigotry of low expectations with this insult to the intelligence of blacks.

The UTLA doesn’t care a fig about the welfare of blacks or of black children or of any of our children or of any of us. The union just wants money.

Full stop.

A Thought on Kipp

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Since I’m thinking about things today.

KIPP Public Schools is a nation-wide charter school organization that has had outsized success in teaching its students, as has virtually all charter and voucher schools and school organizations in the US.  It had a motto, Work Hard. Be Nice., which it scrapped in an attempt to pander to the woke gangs.

In defense of that move, Kipp Co-Founder Dave Levin wrote a Letter to The Wall Street Journal. Toward the end of that letter, Levin made the remarkable claim that

Hard work is essential. Character matters.

Which is true for most of us, but it seems petty rationalization from Levin. If he really believed in the importance of hard work and character, he and his organization would not have struck their Work Hard. Be Nice. motto altogether.

Work Hard. Be Nice. Create our Future.—adapted from Kipp’s claimed Vision statement—would have been a fine update.

But no.

It’s a Start

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But it can’t possibly be the final answer; it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has issued the final rule regarding college/university sexual harassment complaints and how colleges/universities must handle them. Along the way, DeVos revoked with finality the Obama DoEd rule that eliminated the rights of the accused.

It allows both the accused and accuser to submit evidence and participate in cross-examination in live proceedings, and both parties can also appeal a school’s ruling. Victims-rights advocates say the provision for cross-examinations could traumatize those alleging misconduct and potentially keep them from filing complaints at all.
It also allows institutions to choose one of two standards of evidence—”clear and convincing,” or the lower “preponderance of the evidence,” which just requires a greater than 50% likelihood of wrongdoing—as long as they apply the standard evenly for all cases

The victim’s rights advocates objections can be dismissed out of hand—they’ve never been interested in due process or the rights of the accused.

However.

There should be no ability for the accuser to keep appealing until she gets the ruling she wants. A ruling that the boy didn’t do what he was accused of doing should be final.

Too, there should be no choice in the standards of evidence. The accused too often is being charged with a crime or a near crime. The only legitimate standard of evidence should be clear and convincing, and any…guilty verdict…should be required to be arrived at “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Furthermore, there needs to be a better limit on the cases a college/university is permitted to investigate. An outside, unaffiliated party should determine whether the misbehavior being alleged would be a crime. If the determination is that a crime is being alleged, then the matter should be turned over to the police—not the campus police, but the local police or sheriff’s department—for investigation. If appropriate, the case then should be turned over to the local prosecutor. Colleges/universities are not qualified to investigate allegations of crimes.

This rule is far better than the travesty that Obama and his Education Department inflicted on our students. That was a very low bar, though.

Education Standards

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A St Paul, MN, public schools educator helping teachers decried insistence that consistent standards be applied to students and their school performance.

A child living in poverty with a single, working parent, little support, marginal technology, and a spotty Wi-Fi connection cannot be held to the same standard as a child of a well-educated family, whose parents are working from home, with ample technological devices, high-speed connectivity and support.

Of course, he can. The child either has mastered the material and is qualified to move on, or he has not. An honestly assigned grade is an index of the level of mastery.

The reason(s) for a failure to master are what is worthy of addressal. Inadequate teaching, immaturity of the child’s development relative to the material, incapacity of the child, unavailability of the needed materials and/or inadequate access to available material (perhaps due to the effects the “educator” listed) are a few such reasons.

It’s breathtaking that someone styling herself an educator is confused by this.