Education
August 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I don’t know that there has ever been a place and time in American history when only racists were permitted to teach in the public schools. Mississippi in, say, 1935? I don’t know, maybe. But to my knowledge they had no purity test. Contrast that with Minnesota in 2022, where the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board is considering a new standard that would only allow people who profess
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August 23, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Last week Alpha News reported on the blatantly racist contract provision in the new teachers’ union contract with the Minneapolis school district. John drew attention to the Alpha News story the same day. The contract provision is not only blatantly racist, it is blatantly illegal. Alpha News (on whose board I site) performed a public service in reporting on the provision and it has since become a national story. Teachers’
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August 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
We wrote here about the new teachers’ contract for the Minneapolis School District, which provides that white teachers will be laid off first, regardless of seniority, and if teachers are called back after a layoff, white teachers will be called back last. The blatant racism of this contract provision attracted a great deal of adverse comment, but the teachers’ union is sticking to its story: The president and vice president
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August 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
NBC News reports that college attendance is dropping: A little-understood backlash… Little-understood by them. …against higher education is driving an unprecedented decline in enrollment that experts now warn is likely to diminish people’s quality of life and the nation’s economic competitiveness, especially in places where the slide is most severe. I sincerely doubt that. These are the numbers: There are 4 million fewer students in college now than there were
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July 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
The skeptical philosopher David Hume is one of the giants not just of the Enlightenment, but of the whole history of philosophy. But that was not enough to save him from being canceled in his native Scotland. At the instance of “woke” students, who wallow in incorrigible ignorance, David Hume Tower at the University of Edinburgh was re-named “40 George Square.” Hume’s offense was that, while he opposed slavery, there
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July 11, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Our governments’ responses to the Chinese flu epidemic were pretty much a negative image of what should have been done. Instead of protecting the vulnerable, our governments irrationally shut down businesses, churches, and, worst of all, schools. The result was an educational and social disaster, the magnitude of which we have barely begun to understand. You know it’s bad when the New York Times notices: “362 School Counselors on the
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July 6, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Steve likes to highlight ridiculous academic papers; here is one for today. It is titled Get Out: Structural Racism and Academic Terror, and is authored by law professor Renee Nicole Allen of St. Johns University School of Law. Professor Allen begins by comparing America’s law schools to a horror movie titled “Get Out.” Released in 2017, Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed film Get Out explores the horrors of racism. The film’s
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June 23, 2022 — John Hinderaker
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Carson v. Makin on a 6-3 vote, with the liberal bloc dissenting. The case related to a program in Maine, whereby the state will pay for specified educational alternatives for parents who live in districts where there is no secondary school. Public and private schools are eligible as long as they are accredited and meet other requirements, except that only “nonsectarian” schools can participate.
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June 21, 2022 — John Hinderaker
At a school board meeting this evening, the board that governs one of Minnesota’s largest school districts will vote on a resolution that would institutionalize the promotion of LGBTQ doctrine in that district’s schools. Here it is: LGBTQIA+ History and Culture Resolution June 21, 2022 A RESOLUTION of the Osseo Area School District Board of Education to acknowledge the value of the lives of our trans, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, queer,
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May 18, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Who says the mainstream media only report bad news. There’s some very heartwarming and cheering stories out right now. • Let’s start with the New York Times today: With Plunging Enrollment, a ‘Seismic Hit’ to Public Schools ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — In New York City, the nation’s largest school district has lost some 50,000 students over the past two years. In Michigan, enrollment remains more than 50,000 below prepandemic levels
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May 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
America’s response to the covid epidemic was a scandal. On a best-case interpretation, America sacrificed its children to benefit the extremely elderly and the very sick. Even if such a strategy had worked–which it didn’t–it would be a grotesque and arguably evil policy choice. One of the worst things we did to our children was to shut down the public schools, generally at the demand of teachers’ unions. “Remote learning”
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May 12, 2022 — John Hinderaker
You all remember the story: the Biden Department of Justice coordinated with the National School Boards Association to arrange for FBI investigations of parents who are unhappy about their local schools teaching racism and anti-Americanism (Critical Race Theory) and gender confusion, and requiring masks. The episode was so sordid that many state school board associations dropped their affiliation with NSBA, and most people doubted that the FBI would be craven
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May 2, 2022 — Steven Hayward
In other survey news, a brand new Pew Research Center survey finds that the public opposes race-based college admissions by a whopping 74 percent. Here’s the general breakdown of factors the public believe should guide admission: Pew, controlled for decades now by liberals despite—or rather against—the wishes of the very conservative J. Howard Pew who set up the Pew foundation, does its best to fog up the massive public opposition
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April 30, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Currently there is somewhere around $1.6 trillion outstanding in unpaid student loans. That is approximately twice the amount of all credit card debt. And many thousands of college graduates and dropouts find themselves unable or unwilling to repay their student loans. How did we get into this mess? It goes back to the Higher Education Act of 1965, but, as with so many government programs, the senators and representatives who
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April 22, 2022 — John Hinderaker
In recent years, the attitude of liberals toward Critical Race Theory has been summed up as: “It doesn’t exist. And it’s awesome!” But as the infiltration of CRT into curricula across the country has become impossible to deny, promotion of racism and anti-Americanism has come out of the closet. Thus we see the public schools in St. Paul announcing a new “Critical Ethnic Studies” curriculum: So Critical Ethnic Studies is
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April 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Further to the controversy over Florida’s “don’t say gay” law that doesn’t say “don’t say gay” anywhere in the text, it turns out that back in 2014 the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced a report to Congress on the problem of sexual abuse by public school personnel. And lo and behold, the report focuses on grooming behaviors throughout: To be sure, this report is oriented primarily at traditional predators, but
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April 7, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Per InstaPundit, the Left is up in arms because conservatives are referring to the forced sexualization of five, six and seven year old children in the public schools as “grooming.” You can always tell when we have hit on an effective theme: the Left declares it out of bounds. John Nolte has more, beginning with a response to David French, who likened the forced sexualization of small children to Donald
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