An 8-year-old Florida boy was suspended from school after using his finger as a pretend gun while playing cops and robbers with his friends.
Worse,
[A]dministrators at Harmony Community School in Harmony, Fla., said the gesture was an act of violence[.]
Because all 8-year-old boys are terrorist wannabes. Sure.
The Arizona State Court of Appeals (a level junior only to the State’s Supreme Court), Division One, ruled on a suit against that state’s creation of an education savings account (officially, Empowerment Scholarship Account) for grades K-12. The Arizona ESA is designed to provide state funds to help parents send their children to schools of the parents’ choice (and away from failing schools), which might have included church schools. The state had been sued on that last basis—the potential for state funds to be used in a religious environment.
The Appeals Court, politely, waved the BS flag at the suit:
The ESA does not result in an appropriation of public money to encourage the preference of one religion over another, or religion per se over no religion. Any aid to religious schools would be a result of the genuine and independent private choices of the parents. The parents are given numerous ways in which they can educate their children suited to the needs of each child with no preference given to religious or nonreligious schools or programs. Parents are required only to educate their children in the areas of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies, and science.
The ESA is neutral in all respects toward religion and directs aid to a broad class of individuals defined without reference to religion. The ESA is a system of private choice that does not have the effect of advancing religion. Where ESA funds are spent depends solely upon how parents choose to educate their children. Eligible school children may choose to remain in public school, attend a religious school, or a nonreligious private school. They may also use the funds for educational therapies, tutoring services, online learning programs and other curricula, or even at a postsecondary institution. We therefore concur with the trial court that the ESA does not violate the Religion Clause.
Attorney General Eric Holder might want to keep this in mind as he sues Louisiana over that State’s use of state funds to subsidize parent choice. The Louisiana case isn’t about separate of church and state, but it is, as was the Arizona case, very much about parents’ choice of schools for their children.
“Parents are required only to educate their children in the areas of reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies, and science.” They can’t do that much when their children are trapped in failed schools. Holder needs to get out of the way; the only serious outcome of his winning his suit is to keep Louisiana’s children trapped in that state’s failed public schools and so trapped in poverty.
Failed education is the first, and most important, link in the cycle of poverty. By functionally denying children an education, Holder will be making it extremely likely that his victims grow up into either of two adult cycles of poverty: poverty and crime, or poverty and government dependence.
h/t AEIdeas
Allison Benedikt, over at Slate, wrote this:
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
And this:
[I]t seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.
Plainly, given her demonstrated ability to think, she must be a product of just such a public school education.
Oh, wait—proudly so:
I went K-12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.
It just doesn’t get any clearer than this.
…behind which I could get (sorry. My mother was an English teacher of the old school, and knuckle raps are hard to forget).
Tennessee has decided not to consider student performance only when assessing teacher compensation; they’ve decided to use student performance also in determining whether teachers will be allowed to continue to teach. Last week they decided to
pull the license of teachers whose students consistently fail to improve.
“This is not about taking away teacher licenses, but about making sure our students have the best classroom teachers,” said Kevin Huffman, the state’s education commissioner.
The move also is proactive: the policy requires teachers to show they are boosting student achievement rather than requiring the state to show they are not. If the teachers cannot demonstrate student improvement—if the teachers cannot demonstrate actual performance—they would lose their teaching licenses. This places the burden of proof is where it belongs, a good innovation.
The teachers union in Tennessee, the Tennessee Education Association, claims not to oppose holding its members to performance standards, but….
[T]he current plan gives too much weight to the state’s measure of student growth, which she described as “complicated and problematic.”
Here’s the groundwork being laid for the excuse generation wave as the standards are begun to be upheld, which will begin with the 2015 school year.
How strongly will the union actually oppose this move? With the excuses already starting, the union attitude will be problematical. We’ll see in the realization, though, how strongly the unions are invested in student performance as opposed to perks for the teachers—and for union leadership.
In President Barack Obama’s shiny object speech at the University of Central Missouri last week, he talked some about our education system, the obstructiveness of Evil Republicans in not letting Obama have his way on education-related matters, and the politics of the matter. He also said this:
Our kids don’t care about politics.
Isn’t that a terrible indictment of the Obama Education System?