Tag Archives: education

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.

Disposability

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At the end of an op-ed in last Wednesday’s The Wall Street Journal‘s editors included in image promoting a short video that showed an alleged teacher along with someone behind her holding up posters saying, “Masks are Disposable. Teachers Aren’t!”

Actually, teachers are disposable, as are folks in all jobs. And, in fact, as the Chicago Teachers Union has demonstrated, teachers already have been disposed of. All that’s left in Chicago are unionists.

A Teachers Union Rebellion

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The Chicago Pubic Schools district intends to reopen kindergarten through 8th grade for in-class schooling and in-person teaching on 1 February. To that end, the teachers were required to show up for work last Monday to prepare for the reopening.

The Chicago Teachers Union refused.

The union’s excuse was their holding of

the clear and present danger that [in-person classes and teaching] poses to the health of our families and school communities.

This, of course, is nothing more than an exercise in power for power’s sake and a preliminary round leading to demands for more money. The “clear and present danger” has long since been debunked. Children are the least likely to get sick from the Wuhan Virus, both in relative terms and in absolute, and those that do carry the virus are extremely unlikely to spread it, either among themselves or to adults.

The CTU badly wants decertification and the rebellious teachers fired for cause.

The only question is whether Chicago’s management has the moral courage to do so. Sadly for the kids, that’s doubtful.

Controls

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Governments at the State level (look for this to become nationalized under the Biden administration) are trying to force high school students and their families to give up to those State governments (and potentially to the Federal government) their families’ financial condition as a condition of graduating from high school.

Notice that. Petty academic considerations no longer would be sufficient criteria for graduating from a supposedly academic facility. Letting Government peer into private wallets and purses are about to become a primary criterion for fitness to graduate.

The rationalization for this invasion is to guide more high school students toward college. (I’ll elide, in this post, the idea that college isn’t for everyone; a significant fraction—possibly a majority—of high school seniors would be much better off in a trade school or community college learning a trade.)

The government preferred financial record to be executed, according to these governments, is the FAFSA form—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—which gives access to government academic grants. In Florida, high school seniors who eschewed the FAFSA form missed out on $100 million in Federal Pell grants, for instance.

What’s not discussed in these coming mandates is that the form also gives government access to our bank account contents. If the goal is to guide more high school students toward college, an alternative answer is for high schools, their districts, and the State and Federal governments to do a better job of publicizing the plethora of Federal (and State, etc) grants and other funding sources. That publicity does not need letting governments to peer into private accounts to achieve.

That alternative is so plain that questions arise regarding why Governments choose not to consider it.