Tag Archives: education

Forced Busing

Posted on by
Reply

Lance Morrow wrote about forced busing in a “back to the future” piece in The Wall Street Journal. Here’s the larger, more important thing about that early forced busing, of which Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate was so proud and about which Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden was so helpless to comment on.

Forced busing, as bandied about today, is all about using children as tools to achieve a political goal. As in other milieus, we see an example of the Left not seeing people, here children, as human beings, but only as machines for achieving the Left’s goal.

Beyond that, this dehumanization of children masks the true purpose, however clumsily done, of forced busing. It was not that black children could learn only by being next to white children. It was to end the travesty of “separate but equal,” which actually led to unequal—lesser—allocation of teaching resources and teachers to black schools, which deprived black children of the opportunity to learn at all.

Foolishness

Posted on by
1

In response to a Wall Street Journal editorial on Scot Peterson, the cop who stood outside and listened to the butchery going on inside a Florida school, a Letter to the Editor writer had this to say:

Your editorial leaves out of the discussion how outgunned Scot Peterson and his fellow sheriff’s deputies were against shooter Nikolas Cruz with his AR-15 rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. I wonder how many Journal readers (and writers) would have confronted the shooter while bringing a metaphorical knife to a gunfight.

This is just foolish and ignorant along a couple of dimensions.  For one thing, Journal readers (and writers), in the main, are not trained for such dangers and associated risks, the way policemen are.  This is a foolish comparison to make.  The foolishness is illustrated by trained, but wholly unarmed, American men on a French train who defeated and subdued a semi-automatic rifle-armed terrorist.

For another thing, Peterson, and his fellows who arrived as soon as they could, were not seriously outgunned, for all that they had semi-automatic pistols against the butcher’s semi-automatic rifle.  The two types of weapons have similar rates of fire, although the rifle does have a slightly faster one.  Beyond that, the rifle’s primary advantage over pistols is its greater range. That range advantage was greatly reduced—virtually eliminated—in the confined fields of fire available inside a building.

In the end, these slight advantages would have been eliminated by a prompt, determined response and the surprise factor involved.  The advantages would have been reversed entirely by the numbers of police entering as promptly as they could, producing a variety of firing origins against the single point of the butcher.

And in the event, I would expect at least a fraction of (hypothetical) Journal readers (and writers) who might have been on scene to attack the butcher rather than try to duck away.  The folks on scene at the start of an event are, after all, the first responders.

Vaccination and Quarantine

Posted on by
Reply

Various jurisdictions in a number of States have begun barring unvaccinated students from schools following an outbreak of a contagious disease, particularly measles and chicken pox (so far).

Some school districts in the US are booting unvaccinated students from campuses where infectious-disease cases have been confirmed, as the spread of measles accelerates in some states.

“Quarantining” on the basis of vaccination status (not the classic quarantine, which blocks departure from a specific location, but one that prevents entry into specific locations) is hitting the courts, too.

In Kentucky, 32 cases of chickenpox at Our Lady of the Assumption Church and Academy in Walton resulted in unvaccinated students being removed from school in March for three weeks, the time it would take for symptoms to appear. An 18-year-old unvaccinated student lost a lawsuit challenging the ban on religious beliefs.

The court ruled entirely correctly on that suit.  A family is entirely within its rights to decline vaccination on religious grounds.  However, that right does not extend to exposing others to the outcome of that non-vaccination; that family may not expose others’ children to the disease targeted by the vaccination.

Nor do such families have any right to expose other families’ pocketbooks to the costs of outcomes from non-vaccination.  Families exercising their right to not vaccinate cannot, legitimately, inflict the costs of treatment on other families, whether those other children have been vaccinated or not.

A Recognition

Posted on by
Reply

At last, the racism inherent in affirmative action is starting to be recognized.

Civil rights officials at the US Education Department are requiring the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center medical school to cease factoring race into admissions decisions, putting other institutions of higher education on notice that their continued use of affirmative action policies will draw federal scrutiny.

The rest of the Texas Tech University System has already eliminated the use of racist (and sexist) affirmative action policies in its admissions process.

There’ll continue to be resistance, though, in the “academic” community.  Here’s Peter McDonough, Vice President and General Counsel for the American Council on Education

We do worry that a college or university may interpret a report of a resolution…as saying, “If you take race or ethnicity into account, you can be investigated.”

I certainly hope so.  Neither racism nor the bigotry of ethnicity preference—nor sexism—has any place in American society, much less as a selection criterion for anything.

Next up: completing this evolution by formally and explicitly ridding affirmative action of its inherent sexism.

Then, to saucer and blow this travesty, we need the Supreme Court to stop dithering, recognize that ex-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 20 years are long expired, and eliminate all vestiges of the use of race, or sex, or ethnicity, or any other non-merit-related discriminant from affirmative action programs.

Control

Posted on by
Reply

Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris (D, CA) wants the Federal government to pay a significant fraction of public school teachers’ salaries.

What a terrible idea.

The Federal government paying a significant fraction of public school teachers’ salaries means Federal government control of our public schools. Those schools are in enough trouble; we don’t need the Feds getting in the way, also.

Aside from that, this is just another Progressive-Democratic Party attempt to grab our money, this time to deny it to our heirs.  Again.

Apart from both of those, this is another example of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s contributing to the erosion of our families, illustrated by this claim of Harris’:

Our country’s success is a product of the two groups who raise our children: parents and teachers. We are not paying our teachers their value[.]

Teachers help raise our children? No, that’s the exclusive province of parents; schools are not ex loco parentis child care centers, and teachers must stop being babysitters and do the only thing they’re hired to do: teach.