Becky Pringle on X - "Our current standardized testing system is inaccurate, inequitable, and just plain broken. Our students deserve better."
Wesley Yang on X - "It's our schools' capacity to teach reading and math that is broken. Standardized testing is how we know this. The president of the NEA wants to hide the evidence."
Bryan Beal 🎧 on X - "Yup. Teachers Unions hate standardized testing because it’s the only tool we have to see if teachers and schools are actually doing their jobs."
Confession: teaching at a Title I school with a progressive admin has made me less liberal… : Teachers - "…and it’s making me sad how callous I’ve become. At the beginning of my career I swallowed all the social justice, restorative discipline, no grade below a 50, build relationships stuff hook line and sinker. Now in year 10, I feel like a bitter shell of myself who no longer believes in any of it. The main drivers of this:
1. Horrendous student behavior, directly proportionate to bad parenting, that admin excuses as “it’s just trauma, we can’t discipline for that” while students run into zero consequences until they get arrested at age 17 for felonies.
2. Continued lowering of the bar of rigor until it’s basically in the toilet, all in the name of equity, while kids who are trying to go to college can’t find rigorous courses to take (and in the few that exist, everyone is allowed in because of equity, so tons of kids just fuck around).
3. Prioritizing the needs of 3-4 disruptive students over the needs of the other 30 trying to learn, until even those 30 give up.
4. This one is tricky but: browbeating some teachers into accepting unprofessional, uncollegial behavior from other teachers because admin is afraid of being called racist.
5. Seeing the long term effects of lowered expectations, “grace”, and accepting the bare minimum from students and families, and the culture that fosters of entitlement/customer service rather than a true relationship between parents and teachers
6. Being held hostage emotionally by kids who say “that’s racist” any time they are asked to do something other than sit on TikTok and admin forced to take it seriously because they’re scared not to
It’s truly unreal to experience all of this and then hear white SJWs scream about how unfair the world is for kids of color and it’s all the fault of whiteness…I’m sorry, fucking WHAT? I get shit on by kids all day, and it’s my fault? I hate what this has done to me. I feel like a Fox News asshole."
It's interesting that recognising reality means you're "a Fox News asshole". That has interesting implications for what Fox News reports.
Surprisingly, all the comments I saw supported OP
Baltimore City Student misses first 140 school days, marked as present and passes classes - "“I’m excited for him,” said Latasha Phillips, as her son prepared for his first day of eleventh grade on the 141st day of the school year. “I’m just glad he’s not sitting here all day, not being productive.” Her son, Qwantay Spearman, has physical disabilities. He attends ConneXions, a charter school in West Baltimore, where he’s thrived, earning a 3.7 grade point average, until this year. Qwantay missed the first 140 days of school because Baltimore City Schools could not provide him with a nurse, which is required under his federally mandated IEP or Individualized Education Program... This is Qwantay’s report card through March 1, 2022. In the first semester of this school year, according to his report card, Qwantay passed five classes, including Modern World History and Spanish. In Physics, he somehow earned a B-. When asked if he remembered taking Physics, Qwantay replied, “No.” When asked if he knew a teacher named S. Brooks, who was listed on the report card for one of his courses, Qwantay replied, “Nope.” The report card says he passed Algebra II with a D. His teacher even wrote Qwantay is a “pleasure to teach” with his “quality of work improving.” “He shouldn't have any grades on there, because he has not been to school,” Phillips told Project Baltimore. But according to Qwantay’s report card, he has been in school. He was marked present 33.5 days in the first quarter, even though he was not in class a single day. His family says those attendance numbers were falsified... The day after Project Baltimore spoke with the family, Qwantay’s mother received a call that a nurse was now available. After 140 days, her son could go to school... we went to a recent public event that Santelises was scheduled to attend. She never arrived, but two school board members did. After the event was over, Project Baltimore’s Chris Papst approached the board members, who refused to answer his questions. “This is harassment,” said Baltimore City School Board Member Michelle Bondima, who walked away as Papst introduced himself. As Papst followed, attempting to ask her a question, Bondima turned and replied, “I said you are harassing me.” Project Baltimore also approached Baltimore City School Board Member Shantell L. Roberts. “There is a young man, Qwantay Spearman, who has been greatly impacted by what happened at his school,” Papst explained to Roberts. “I’m sorry, you’re being disruptive to this event,” Roberts replied, even though the event had concluded. Papst proceeded to ask Roberts, “As a school board member why won’t you speak with the media? Why won’t you grant interviews, isn’t that part of your job?”
When liberals complain about "harassment", they usually define it to mean disagreement with them or attempts to hold them accountable
Keywords: Liberals define harassment, liberal definition of harassment
To Shrink Learning Gap, This District Offers Classes Separated by Race - WSJ - "School leaders in this college town just north of Chicago have been battling a sizable academic achievement gap between Black, Latino and white students for decades. So a few years ago, the school district decided to try something new at the high school: classrooms voluntarily separated by race. Nearly 200 Black and Latino students at Evanston Township High School signed up this year for math classes and a writing seminar intended for students of the same race, taught by a teacher of color. These optional so-called affinity classes are designed to address the achievement gap by making students feel more comfortable in class, district leaders have said, particularly in Advanced Placement courses that historically have enrolled few Black and Latino students... Researchers have found some small improvements in grades and retention from such programs. Other studies have shown some improved educational outcomes, such as graduation rates, for Black and Latino students taught by teachers of the same race. Public schools have also dabbled with separating students by gender, with successful programs that, for instance, encourage girls to become engineers... “A lot of times within our education system, Black students are expected to conform to a white standard,” said Dena Luna, who leads Black student-achievement initiatives in Minneapolis Public Schools... Leaders in Evanston’s high-school district, board members and teachers declined or ignored repeated requests to comment on the courses over several months. When a Wall Street Journal reporter arrived at a public meeting for parents of Black students, a district spokeswoman said she would cancel the meeting if the reporter didn’t leave... Equity guides many of the district’s decisions, embodied in a stated board goal: “Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.”... The district hasn’t presented any analyses on whether the affinity courses have improved student outcomes."
When liberals support racial segregation
Apparently there're different standards for white and black students. Weird. I thought this is a far right conspiracy theory
I wonder why they're scared of the media. Surely it can't be because they have something to hide?
Teacher Credentials Don't Matter for Student Achievement - "Many American school districts pay teachers with master's degrees substantially more, even though a number of studies - including this one -- suggest that having a master's degree has little if any effect on student achievement... Teachers who entered teaching with a master's degree, or who earned it within five years of beginning to teach, were as effective as teachers without a master's degree. Teachers who earned a master's degree more than five years after they started teaching were less effective than those without master's degrees. As in previous studies, the authors find here that teachers with more experience are better teachers. This is the case even after accounting for the fact that the teachers who remain teachers may, on average, be less effective than those who leave. The benefit of experience peaks at 21-27 years of teaching and adds 0.092 to 0.119 standard deviations to student achievement scores. More than half of that gain occurs during the first years of teaching. Teachers who come from competitive undergraduate institutions are somewhat more effective than those who come from uncompetitive colleges or universities, the researchers find. By comparison, increasing class size by five students reduces math achievement by 0.015 to 0.025 standard deviations, and reading achievement by 0.010 to 0.020 standard deviations. Having a parent with only a high school degree decreases math scores by about 0.11 standard deviations relative to having a parent who has a college degree. Having a parent who is a high school dropout reduces achievement by another 0.11 standard deviations. The effects for reading are slightly larger than for math... Previous work suggests that teachers with stronger credentials tend to end up teaching students who perform better academically. This rich dataset allows the authors to correct for the possibility that, while teachers with better credentials can command better students and thus are associated with high student achievement, the better results may not stem from better teaching."
Clearly teachers need even more training, and standardised tests are stupid because they are the best way to hold teachers accountable
New Central Bucks Board Democrat president sworn in with hand on sexually explicit book - "A new Pennsylvania school board president was sworn into her position on Monday with her hand on a stack of controversial books, one of which included sexually explicit content. Karen Smith, a Democrat who was re-elected to the school board on Nov. 7, was sworn in on Dec. 4 as the new Central Bucks school board president... One of the books Smith placed her hand on is "Flamer," written by award-winning author and artist Mike Curato. Released in 2020, Curato's work is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel set in 1995. It tells the story of a character who is bullied at a Boy Scouts summer camp for "acting in a manner considered stereotypical of gay men." The graphic novel includes characters discussing pornography, erections, masturbation, penis size, and an illustration that depicts naked teenage boys. The book courted controversy across the country, making the American Library Association's list as one of the most "banned books" of 2022. The book has reportedly been challenged in at least 62 schools for its LGBTQ content and sexually explicit material."
On Facebook, liberals were cheering her fight for "banned books" and condemning Fox News for lying, without ever pointing out how Fox was wrong. As usual, "this is not happening, and it's good that it is". Why do liberals want to sexualise kids so much?
Portland Public Schools to factor in gender identity, race into school discipline: 'Completely backwards' - "School staff at Oregon-based Portland Public Schools (PPS) will now be required to consider a disruptive student's race, gender identity and sexual orientation before disciplining them. A new collective bargaining agreement between Portland Public Schools and its teachers includes a change in policy regarding disciplinary actions... the support plan "must take into consideration the impact of issues related to the student's trauma, race, gender identity/presentation, sexual orientation, disability, social-emotional learning, and restorative justice as appropriate for the student." The agreement also says that the district utilizes a research-based "Racial Equity and Social Justice, Restorative Justice, and Trauma Informed" program to reduce exclusionary discipline practices... Kevin O’Leary, a famed investor and entrepreneur, said he realized the union structure was broken after spending half of his career in the educational software business trying to advance reading and math scores in the United States. "We're talking about punishing students, when really parents – who pay the taxes to support this and pay teachers – have never been answered this question: Why does a union not reward good teachers that advance in terms of metrics that they have to advance in to get into college, which is reading math scores? And punish the ones that are no good at it," O'Leary said. "It’s a cancer in our educational system." Host Harris Faulkner added that paying teachers based on their performance was common sense. "It's actually practical. It makes sense. But unfortunately, these teachers unions and these kinds of policies are just rooted in a virtue signaling," Faulkner said."
Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Congresswoman @AyannaPressley comes out in favor of offering kids p*r*ogr*phic books in schools. Some books include details on gay s*x, promote watching p*rn and m*stur*ation, encourage the use of s*x apps, and guides to k*nks and f*ti*hes. They never provide visuals from the books for some reason... Why does @AyannaPressley wants kids reading p*rn in school?"
"Gender Queer, This Book Is Gay, Flamer, Let's Talk About It"
Libs of TikTok on X - "SCOOP: S*x assignment given to students in @hills_ny has students look up facts and laws about s*x including a*nal s*ex, or*l s*x, and s*x toys. Why are schools having students research s*x and s*x positions? .@hills_ny did not respond to our request for comment."
Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 on X - "As of yesterday, Oregon high school students won't have to know how to read, write or do math to graduate from high school. For at least the NEXT FIVE YEARS. DEMOCRAT SCHOOL BOARD voted for this. In other words, Democrats don’t think Black kids are smart enough to learn. They call it EQUITY. I call it BULLSHIT. How they gonna compete with better-educated kids for good-paying jobs? Oh right, they won’t. They black, so they can just be maids and trash collectors and janitors AS USUAL. This right here is why I stopped being a Democrat. They all smoke and mirrors! They never got over losing the slaves, so they make up for it by using education to keep us down. Next they gonna report they got the highest scores for graduation because everybody passed. Fuck these Democrats."
Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color
Thomas Sowell Quote - "One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans – anything except reason"
Meme - Emil O W Kirkegaard @KirkegaardEmil: "Tell me that HBDers are pathologically obsessed with race one more time."
i/o @eyeslasho: "These were the most popular topics at the 2019 annual conference of the American Educational Research Association.
Number of Listings in Topic Index
American Education Research Association - 2019 Annual Conference
Least: career/technical ed
Not many: queer theory
Quite a few: gender studies
Very many: identity
Even more: race"
Of course, liberal teachers couldn't possibly be indoctrinating their students
TFA Alumnus Describes Barriers to Student Achievement - "A large number of this country’s schools are failing its students—but not in the way that many columnists, education reformers, or school experts would have you believe... When people ask me what I believe was the number one barrier to student achievement at my school, I always offer the same answer: the failure of the school and district to address chronically disruptive students. It was a problem created by negligent leaders who willingly allowed a free-for-all environment that was conducive to chaos instead of learning. I’ll never forget the first day of staff development my second year. During the “welcome back” talk, my principal handed out a sheet which detailed the number of discipline referrals submitted by each teacher the previous year. We were informed that it is wrong to submit a lot of them because discipline is a classroom-management issue and therefore must be addressed within the classroom. Sending students to the office, she said, is simply not acceptable or allowed... It’s one thing when a student throws a paper ball at his friend, or when someone utters a rude comment. It’s quite another thing when a student tells you that she’ll “crack” your “bitch ass” or demands that you “get the fuck out of [her] face”. Unfortunately, as the students soon discovered, our principal offered no support whatsoever. Nearly ever discipline referral sent to the office was returned with a polite reminder to please contact the students’ parents. Clear and consistent consequences simply did not exist—even though they were mandated by the district’s code of conduct. Once that realization spread, the school effectively went from quality to chaos overnight... By “students”, I’m of course referring to the 15-25% that were chronically disruptive. The truth is that the overwhelming majority in each class were great kids who came every day ready to learn... This wasn’t just a problem at my school. When I spoke with other teachers throughout the district, they told me that the situation at their school was nearly identical to mine. Some of their stories are just as outrageous. When students are subjected to a toxic environment that prevents learning, all other education concerns—curriculum, standards, integrating technology, etc—become totally irrelevant. Unfortunately, this is something rarely ever addressed in both local and national media. And education reformers—whether from watching Freedom Writers one too many times or just understanding that blaming teachers is politically expedient right now—repeat until they’re red in the face the idea that a teacher with leadership skills and high expectations can fix everything short of the conflict in the Middle East... I should be surprised that the toxic atmosphere wasn’t addressed, but I’m not. I came to realize a certain truth about this country’s urban schools: their leaders—especially those at the district level—rarely have any stake in whether or not the schools are successes or failures. They’re not a part of those communities, they don’t send their children to the schools they oversee (except, sometimes, the selective admissions-based ones), and at the end of the day, whatever happens doesn’t really affect them. They’re working with other peoples’ children. The only thing they have to lose is their jobs—and that’s easy to protect if they cover their rear, furnish the necessary documentation, and blame those below them... Were there other problems? Of course there were, but the chronically disruptive atmosphere was by far the most significant and destructive. It’s a problem that’s conspicuously absent from successful suburban schools—which don’t tolerate outrageous misbehavior—and is usually never mentioned by education reformers, policy experts, consultants, and the other people who pretend to know what’s best for our schools. Perhaps my expectations are too high. After all, how can I expect them to understand the seriousness of this problem if they’ve spent little or no time working in the very schools they pretend to be experts about?"
Discipline is racist, so
Liberal pedagogy at work again. Of course it's self-perpetuating since even more liberal dogma (and money) is called for when results worsen, so it serves its purpose
The Fight Over What Children Learn - "For the first time, Zoom gave parents a window into public school classrooms and many of them didn’t like what they saw. From poor lessons to inappropriate reading material to troubling racial essentialism, parents were roused from their usual passivity to push back against the educational monoculture that dominates school boards, unions, and academic schools of education... Parents want schools open, and they want to know what their kids are being taught. A key moment in this parental awakening came in early October when Democrat Terry McAuliffe insisted that he didn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This was widely seen as a major turning point during the 2021 race for governor in the very blue state of Virginia. McAuliffe had been leading in the polls, but K–12 parents, in particular, abandoned him en masse, and he ultimately lost to Republican newcomer Glenn Youngkin. This electoral upset exposed—at a national level—the massive gap that had grown between parents on the one hand and pundits, politicians, and teachers’ unions on the other. Parents do want a say in what their children are taught. But not everyone agrees. In December, a New York Times writer stated on Meet the Press, “I don't really understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught. I'm not a professional educator. I don't have a degree in social studies.” Well, I am a professional educator. I am a professor of education who teaches teachers, and I can say unequivocally that the belief that one needs to be a professional educator to have meaningful insights as to what ought to be taught reflects a fundamental philosophical and cultural misunderstanding of what education actually is. People who work in the media or in politics tend to assume that their experiences are unquestionably normative. They are almost exclusively college-educated city-dwellers who were good at navigating a system of schooling that is as much networking and conformity as it is algebra and biology. For them, education is and was a predominantly social and cultural reality, the substance of which happens to be made up of academic content. Successfully achieving careers in high-prestige fields, they excelled at what education researchers have termed the “hidden curriculum”—the underlying norms and values that form the backbone of socialization into particular worldviews and practices. And because they (perhaps subconsciously) equate the business of education with this socialization, they tend to see the social values of education as the legitimate enterprise of education professionals, not parents. But there’s something deeply mistaken about this view. “Education”—a noun standing on its own—doesn’t exist. There is no set of concepts, ideas, facts, or skills that are intrinsically necessary for individual human beings to possess. The breakdown of school subjects into math, science, English language arts, and social studies is an accident of history... education is about values, but no educator or education researcher can tell us which values are worthwhile. Indeed, the most significant instance in which educators did impose their values with the force of law resulted in one of the most horrific cultural genocides in US history, as Native Americans were forcibly stripped of their language and culture in “Indian schools” designed to Westernize them. Of course, there are some things that we need from our education system in order to function as a society. We need an education system that will encourage students to grow into law-abiding citizens; we need a system that allows people to flourish and to live happy lives; and we need education that will encourage people to engage in honest work and support their families productively... Pundits and politicians who don’t think parents should have a say in what children are taught are actually attempting to prescribe, in a homogenized, top-down way, a model of life that worked for them... Their appeal to the authority of education researchers is simply a mechanism to entrench a system that validates their life choices and values, but those with other values, interests, and intellectual inclinations will be ill-served by the very same system. This is not specifically an anti-CRT argument. CRT happens to represent the present values of a small segment of mostly upper-class urban elites, but any set of values, when uniformly imposed top-down, will harm children and communities who see the world very differently. The trick these policymakers play is to pretend that their conception of education is not just one choice among many, but is the default baseline, from which anything else is a deviation. The model of life they imagine is based on the myth of an all-purpose education designed by experts to allow every child to choose any future they like. But this has produced an educational system that has left many students with no future; it’s been a failure for all but a select few, precisely because it doesn’t prepare students for all possibilities (an impossibility), but actually reflects the concerns and interests of a small minority of education experts. The idea that those experts, and only those experts, can opine on what to teach and how to teach it is self-serving. Parents sense this and respond accordingly."
The left hate the law (ACAB), happiness (since you're blind to "structures of oppression") and honest work (they think no one should have to work to survive), so what they're doing to education makes sense
Richard Hanania on X - "They gave Chicago public school students free laptops and iPads during the 2021-22 year. 77K were “lost” or stolen for a total value of $23 million. There are 330K public school students in Chicago. That’s about 1 lost device for every 4 students."
Obviously the problem is underfunding, and they need even more money
End Wokeness on X - "EXCLUSIVE: This was an internal memo sent to staff and teachers at Denver Public Schools: "Black Excellence Pledge" Included in this pledge: "Understand the prevalence & deep harm whiteness brings to students" "Equity-based revisions to curriculum" "Work to dismantle the system that allows certain students to excel, others to perish" It also states that all whites are racist and perpetuate racist ideologies, policies, & practices."
Asian parents claim NY STEM program discriminates against their kids in favor of black, Hispanic students: suit - "while black, Hispanic and Native American students can apply regardless of family wealth — Asian and white schoolkids need to meet certain low-income criteria... “In other words, the Hispanic child of a multi-millionaire is eligible to apply to STEP, while an Asian American child whose family earns just above the state’s low- income threshold is not, solely because of her race or ethnicity,” the filing states. The allegedly biased admissions criteria have been in place for nearly four decades, the suit claims, adding: “Thirty-nine years of discrimination is enough.”... “STEP’s expressly race-conscious application process blatantly violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.”"
J.B. Pritzker vs. Catholic Schools - WSJ - "Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Democrats in the Legislature killed the Invest in Kids scholarship program last year, blocking money for more than 9,000 low-income students to escape failing public schools. Now comes the second wave of destruction as the schools that welcomed the scholarship students are beginning to close... The point to understand is that this is exactly what the Chicago Teachers Union and their Democratic front men intended in killing the Invest in Kids program. They want private schools to fail so that parents have no choice other than sending their children to union-run schools. It’s a moral and political disgrace."
