Category Archives: education

“Troubled by the Strikes”

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Recall the duration of school closures due, allegedly, to the Wuhan Virus situation in our nation. Not everyone is on board with the teachers unions’ attitude toward reopening our schools and getting our children back to in-person learning—where they actually could learn and where they, and school staff, would be far safer than either are cooped up at home.

Tommy Schultz, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the American Federation for Children:

For the past year, there has essentially been a national teachers union strike that has left tens of millions of families without access to an adequate education[.]

And

This will haunt our country for decades to come, and the teachers unions’ blatant refusal to [follow] science in the name of political extortion is outright shameful[.]

You bet. And the unions’ strike demands? A guarantee of perfect safety. Oh, and more money. Billions of dollars more money.

It’s not just the unions, though. Here’s a teacher, Rebecca Friedrichs.

Most good teachers are deeply troubled by the strikes. We never want to deny the children even one day of learning, and we understand that we are servant leaders to those children.

That is, to use the technical term, a crock; it’s just porch dog yapping. If “good teachers” actually were troubled by the strikes, they’d tell their union bosses to take a hike, and they would go back to the classroom.

Friedrichs also used to be a union official, and she was the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v CTA, through which she and some of her colleagues tried to get the right for teachers, et al., to decide for themselves whether or not to fund unions. That makes her empty rhetoric all the more useless.

Moreover, although Friedrichs’ suit failed at the Supreme Court when the short-handed Court voted 4-4, nothing in that failure forced union members to stay union members. They were, they are, they always have been free to stop being card carriers, to leave the union, and thereby to regain their right to decide.

There’s also the meme that teachers are afraid to cross their unions. They may be, but they’re only afraid of their own mental creation of union responses—which in the end, are only words. And so we have more crockery.

Still, if teachers really are so timid, it’s time for adults to step up: school boards and local and State governing jurisdictions need to move to decertify the unions, fire the teachers who won’t go back to work, and redirect the funds originally allocated to closed schools to private, parochial, voucher, and charter schools that are open. After all, if a school isn’t operating, it doesn’t need any money.

‘Course, that takes the true adults—We the People, particularly us parents—to do our jobs and fire reluctant board members and politicians and elect those who will take prompt, decisive action.

A Couple of Test Outcomes

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…illustrate the problem.

Since schools across the US first closed last spring, sending about 50 million children to learn remotely, one looming question for educators, parents and children has been: how much has learning suffered?
Data from two national testing programs, Renaissance Learning Inc and NWEA, which are used widely by US public schools to assess students’ progress, show widespread performance declines at the start of this academic year, particularly in math.

These are the outcomes. The teachers unions don’t care, though. They don’t want their teachers to return to the classroom unless and until union leadership can be guaranteed absolute freedom from the risk of Wuhan Virus infection. Which is, of course, a deliberately impossible criterion.

YGTBSM

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Another in the annals. This one, in Australia, illustrates another failure of those secondary schools that are trapped in the gaols of the Woke Left.

Australian National University have a new Gender-Inclusive Handbook out—fortunately not authoritative, only “advisory,”—giving “guidance” on the correct terms professors should use.

A couple examples:

  • not “mother,” but “gestational parent”
  • not “father,” but “non-birthing parent”
  • not “breastfeeding,” but “breast/chest feeding”
  • not “mother’s milk,” but “human/parent’s milk”

After all, according to a Lauren Dinour bit of…research…

heterosexual and woman-focused lactation language…can misgender, isolate, and harm transmasculine parents and non-heteronormative families.

Right.

I have a question. What if the father identifies as the mother?

OK, two questions. Why is the handbook only in English? There are five Asian and Middle eastern languages spoken in Australia, and over 250 indigenous Australian languages spoken there. I thought they were serious about inclusivity.

Indictments

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North Carolina Lt Governor Mark Robinson opposed a set of social studies standards proposed to be used in the State’s K-12 schools because he considered them to be fundamentally un-American. As an aside, Robinson is a citizen of the United States and of North Carolina who happens to be black.

In response to Robinson’s opposition, WRAL published the following cartoon:

Wholly independently of the rightness or wrongness Robinson’s argument, North Carolina’s Progressive-Democrats indict themselves in two ways with this political cartoon. One way is their dishonesty in attributing the KKK to the Republican Party. As any graduate of grade school American history and social studies lessons knows, the KKK was created by the post-Civil War Democratic Party (you know that party—the same gang that forced that civil war on us at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives just so Democrats could try to keep their slaves) explicitly to terrorize newly freed blacks and all those who supported them.

The second way those Progressive-Democrats indict themselves is with their…dismay…over a Republican daring to oppose social studies “standards” Progressive-Democrats pretend are in some way inclusive, when those standards are explicitly designed to be divisive and to denigrate all the good things about America—like winning that Civil War and ending slavery, and putting the KKK into the garbage sack, until, that is, Progressive-Democrats dragged the thuggery back out to use as a shibboleth against anyone farther right than their Leftism.

Defunding the Schools

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is proposing a stern response regarding schools that cannot reopen because the national teachers unions and the school districts’ associated teachers union locals refuse to send their members back to work. That refusal comes in the face of the fact that it’s safe for schools to reopen and teachers to report for in-person teaching, at the least for grades K-8, because the kids both don’t get sick from the Wuhan Virus, and they don’t spread any Wuhan Virus infection they may be carrying among themselves or to adults.

…I will be filing legislation to hold our nation to that promise [President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to reopen all schools within the first 100 days of his becoming president].
If a school continues to cave to the unions at the expense of their students, they should not receive funding. I propose that if a school refuses to offer students an in-person option by April 30, 2021, 100 days into the Biden administration, that funding should be rescinded and directed to school choice and the reopening plans of schools that are prioritizing their students’ needs.

It’s a necessary step, but it’s one that would hurt the schools as much, if not more, than it would the shirking unions and union members. Thus, it cannot be the only step.

Union locals that won’t send their members back to their jobs, back to the jobs unions insist on controlling, also must be decertified in their school districts, and those teachers who continue to refuse to report for their jobs—their duties—should be terminated for cause (for cause so that these shirkers would be ineligible for most unemployment-related welfare).

Who will teach the kids if the teachers are fired, some might ask. Those some should also ask, who’s teaching the kids now? And, no, virtual teaching for those grades is all virtual and no teaching and a complete failure, even after all these months of teachers supposedly learning how to teach those age groups virtually.

With the shirkers fired, the teaching slots would be free and the districts could call in substitute teachers already on their lists (or remove them from their lists if they refuse to report for duty); hire replacements; reallocate the now unused payroll funds to support home-school pods and individual home-schooling families; in the spirit of Rubio’s proposed reallocation of Federal funds, work with local voucher and charter schools—the list is extensive.

The unions and their members aren’t doing their jobs; they don’t need either compensation or to have those jobs. Of course, taking that necessarily local action requires more courage, more strength of character, than those districts targeted by Rubio’s proposed legislation have been showing—that’s part of the need for his bill.