Tag Archives: education

Firing a Teacher

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A Cobb County Georgia elementary school teacher was terminated by the school’s school board for reading a book centered on gender identity to her fifth-grade students. The book feature[d] a nonbinary character and challenge[d] the concept that there are only two genders. Such books are barred from elementary school instruction under Georgia’s Divisive Concepts Law that prohibits teachers from using controversial topics in their instruction. The school district also argued that the teacher, with her reading, violated three district policies.

The firing came after an investigative three-person tribunal had sided with the teacher, recommending that she keep her job. Of course, the teacher and her lawyer are crying politics over the firing. The lawyer, Craig Goodmark:

The board came in, and in an act of what can only be construed an act of politics over policy fired [the teacher].

Oh, wait. Even with recommending her retention,

the tribunal decided that she violated just two of the three policies the district says she broke.

Well, that’s all right, then. Two violations are OK; we’ll think about three violations.

No, it seems to this poor, dumb Texan that it was the tribunal that’s playing politics.

Why Johnny Can’t Read

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An increasing number of States are looking at passing laws blocking third-graders who can’t read (well enough) from being passed on to fourth grade.

Tennessee, Michigan, and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests and laws requiring students to repeat third grade to improve literacy. Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and Nevada have all passed similar laws that will go into effect in the coming years.

Those laws, too, typically include extra tutoring, summer school, and…teacher training (what a concept that last is).

Johnny’s troubles began long before the Wuhan Virus Situation, but the school lockouts lockdowns during that period exacerbated the problem, and they were made manifest when parents, as a result of being locked out of their jobs at the same time, were able to see what actually was happening with their children’s “schooling.” Johnny’s situation was made even more obvious he went back to in-person school.

Know Betters and Coddlers, of course, object. Katherine Bike, a Knox County, TN, school board member, is typical:

I understand they might want to be tackling learning loss, but it’s truly the wrong way to do it. I think the whole thing is unfair.

Her idea of fair: she successfully “appealed” to keep her son from repeating third grade. Because promoting unqualified children to the next grade is what’s fair.

The Know Betters and Coddlers’ fear of what happens when Johnny is held back:

a defeated 18-year-old high-school junior dropping out against [Johnny’s mother’s] wishes.

No. The 18-year-old high-school junior will be defeated by his inability to read, not by his being a year or two older than his classmates.

This is the modern reason why Johhny can’t read. Know Betters and Coddlers don’t care that “can’t read” means can’t read.

Who Restricts What in K-12 Education?

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Cogently put by Keri Ingraham, Discovery Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education Director in her Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

[M]ost “public” schools aren’t public at all.
In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.

There’s this bit, too:

The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.

But the Left and their teacher unions coterie object to lowering those cost barriers, which would free children from the chain link fencing around cheap, but badly ineffective, public schools. It’s those schools with their heretofore captive populations, after all, where the unions hold sway and collect their vig.

The Left and those unions bleat about how a child’s education ought not be based on the child’s family’s ZIP code.

Yet here they are.

It’s Safer This Way

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Recall that, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ (D) slur regarding Florida’s updated education curriculum, Governor Ron DeSantis (R) invited her to Florida to discuss with him that curriculum.

Harris doesn’t want to. She made it to Florida, though, to talk to the 20th Women’s Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Quadrennial Convention. That’s where she made her excuses and backed away.

They attempt to legitimize these unnecessary debates with a proposal that most recently came in of a politically motivated roundtable[.]
Well, I’m here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no redeeming qualities of slavery.

The core of her excuse-making is that strawman of hers, a dolly she’ll have to play with by herself. No one is suggesting, including in the curriculum, that there are, or were, any redeeming qualities of slavery. Nor was that the subject of the discussion DeSantis offered; he offered to discuss the curriculum and how it proposed to teach, in the proximate matter, black history, including slavery, in the United States and in Florida.

It’s easy to sit in the safety of the sidelines and carp. It’s cowardly, too, but it’s entirely consistent for the border tsar who’s never been to our southern border.

Who Interviewed These Folks?

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I have to ask because:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101[.]

How was this newly minted mechanical engineer even hired when he didn’t know the basics of mechanical engineering (how was he able to graduate with a degree when he didn’t know such a basic thing, but that’s for a separate article.) Why wasn’t he given a quick test of the basics? Newly hired secretaries administrative assistants get tested on basics like typing and telephone etiquette and etc. Why wouldn’t any new hire be tested on the basics of the job for which he’s being hired?

Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

It isn’t just mechanical engineering, either, it’s

  • structural engineers unable to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways
  • nursing students struggling to pass a certification exam
  • new call center workers have problems with soft skills
  • Zoo seasonal workers not looking to be productive; if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing

The list goes on. And on. And on….

In the alternative, instead of taking whatever noob wanders in from the sidewalk, or dropping too many dimes on ad hoc spot training, where are the employers’ more formal, organized remedial training programs? What are these employers doing to work with the schools to help them better train their students/recover more quickly from the effects of the Wuhan Virus Situation and the associated remote learning, which aside from failing generally, didn’t get the newly minted mechanical engineer the hands-on design training he should have had?