Higher Ed Administrators and Values

Posted on 16 April 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of Higher Ed Administrators and Values. Read the full post (238 words, estimated 57 secs reading time)

A String’s Attached

Posted on 10 April 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of A String’s Attached. Read the full post (279 words, estimated 1:07 mins reading time)

Grooming

Posted on 8 April 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of Grooming. Read the full post (547 words, estimated 2:11 mins reading time)

“Ladies” is a Microaggression

Posted on 5 April 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of “Ladies” is a Microaggression. Read the full post (274 words, estimated 1:06 mins reading time)

How Do We Know?

Posted on 3 April 2023 by eehines

SecDef Lloyd Austin’s DoD section, the Department of Defense Education Activity, appears to be disbanding DoDEA’s own section focused on pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion claptrap onto our military members’ children in DoD schools. That subordinate organization, the DEI unit, was founded on explicitly racist tenets. These are from the originally selected head of that organization:

So exhausted at the White folks in these PD sessions. This lady actually had the caudacity to say Black people can be racist, too. I had to stop the session and give the Karen the business. We are not the majority. We don’t have power.

This is a preview of How Do We Know?. Read the full post (406 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

“We Cannot Read…”

Posted on 1 April 2023 by eehines

…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.

This is a preview of “We Cannot Read…”. Read the full post (205 words, estimated 49 secs reading time)

Public School Ownership

Posted on 20 March 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of Public School Ownership. Read the full post (456 words, estimated 1:49 mins reading time)

It Takes a Village?

Posted on 9 February 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of It Takes a Village?. Read the full post (227 words, estimated 54 secs reading time)

Mistaken?

Posted on 2 February 2023 by eehines

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.

This is a preview of Mistaken?. Read the full post (152 words, estimated 36 secs reading time)

“Society’s” Needs

Posted on 30 January 2023 by eehines

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 is a preview of “Society’s” Needs. Read the full post (430 words, estimated 1:43 mins reading time)

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Tag Archives: education

Higher Ed Administrators and Values

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A String’s Attached

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Grooming

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“Ladies” is a Microaggression

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How Do We Know?

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“We Cannot Read…”

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Public School Ownership

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It Takes a Village?

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Mistaken?

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“Society’s” Needs

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