When you can't live without bananas

Get email updates of new posts:        (Delivered by FeedBurner)

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Links - 24th July 2024 (1 - Schools in the US)

Chalkboard Heresy 🍎🔥 on X - "Woke attitudes that blame black teenagers’ misbehavior on white teachers’ deficits in “cultural competency” has enabled abhorrent behavior and made our schools less safe. ⬇️🧵  We had a new white female teacher at my school- very motivated, professional.   All year long she struggled with behavior problems, mostly from a group of black female students. But administration blamed her and implied she couldn’t “culturally relate” with the kids (that’s basically calling you a racist in education).  The day this teacher was in an administrative meeting concerning HER behavior, and getting notified of her firing, the same group of girls that had made her classroom hell took her keys and helped some gangbanger steal her car….  While she was in a meeting… being blamed for “how she interacted” with these “misunderstood good kids.”  She was still fired for “poor behavior management.”
I always thought it was incredibly degrading to have to treat black students differently based on some idea that they can’t follow the same rules as everyone else.  I mean, it’s literally a racist concept.  Culturally Relevant Pedagogy."
Waukegan High School teacher’s vehicle stolen after student takes keys, officials say – Chicago Tribune
Longer Than 280 Characters (And Inches) on X - "So, it seems segregation is the logical choice based upon liberal and progressive logic. If white teachers can't "culturally relate" to black students, perhaps these black students should be assigned black teachers and the Asian and white students who want to learn, rather than have class constantly disrupted by volatile cultures, can have white teachers. Because we don't see Asian students being unable to "relate" to their teachers and vice versa.   Black people are always going to fall behind when people keep making excuses for their behavior while basically claiming that it is how they innately are."

Revealed: Woke Seattle school board chief accused of racism - "The woke Seattle school board chief who shuttered its gifted and talented programs because they had too many white and Asian students was previously accused of racism by a colleague, documents from the probe show. Along with another board member, in 2021 Chandra Hampson was found to have violated the policy against harassing, intimidating and bullying over their treatment of two black employees who were working on an anti-racism plan. The anonymous complainants accused Hampson of launching 'an orchestrated campaign of bullying, escalating intimidation, gaslighting and retaliation' against them, according to the investigation report."

Meme - "TracingWoodgrains. 4 years ago
The honors treadmill continues. Here's the cycle:
1. Notice some students in a class are ready to or want to go more in-depth and others aren't or don't want to.
2. Split class into multiple levels, separated by test or student choice.
3. Notice demographic splits or other signs of difference between the two classes, point out that everyone should be receiving the highest-quality education.
4. Combine classes again, probably keeping the name of the higher-level class. YOU ARE HERE
5. Notice some students are getting ahead again and some are falling behind again.
Just check back in another few years."
DEI stands a good chance of breaking the cycle so everyone gets an equally bad educational experience

KingoftheCoast on X - "In 2011, Wisconsin nuked the ability of teachers unions' to negotiate compensation & opened the door to individual pay This incentivized large numbers of college students to enter teaching -- particularly from selective universities -- and appreciably raised K-12 achievement"
Union Reform, Performance Pay, and New Teacher Supply: Evidence from Wisconsin's Act 10
The left keep going on about how good unions are. But then, at some level they love failure (maybe because they can grift more money), so this is a feature, not a bug

Meme - Libs of TikTok: "A parent in Oregon allegedly asked for a copy of his kid's school's S*x Ed curriculum and the school refused to send it. They only allowed him to see it within the school walls on a school computer where he snapped these screenshots. Why are schools hiding lesson plans from parents? They want to indoctrinate your kids with Gender Ideology and fake pronouns without you knowing. This is grooming 101."

Students at this S.F. high school defy odds to get into UCs
i/o on X - "With a 7% student body math proficiency, why wouldn't the students at Mission High School be the most eagerly sought-after applicants by the admissions departments at the most prestigious schools in the UC system? Seems logical. (Oh did I mention the school is 91% non-white?)"
i/o on X - "At that 91% non-white high school in San Francisco that has a higher acceptance rate at Berkeley than most of the top-rated high schools in the state: Math proficiency: 7% Science: 6% Graduation rate: 76%"

Yang on X - "The New York Times just published another essay defending standardized testing. Looks like the tides are turning back to sanity again."

Steve McGuire on X- "NEW: Cornell University has reinstituted required standardized testing in admissions. “Those who were admitted with test scores tended to have somewhat stronger GPAs and were more likely to remain in good academic standing.”"
Weird. We kept being told that standardised tests were useless

Student GPA and test score gaps are growing—and could be slowing pandemic recovery - "Administrative data from North Carolina shows that while students’ state exam scores have declined since pre-pandemic, their course grades are similar to pre-pandemic levels."
Standardised tests are counterproductive, and we should just trust high school grades. All grades are abitrary anyway and grade inflation is a myth

Think Again: Does ‘equitable’ grading benefit students? - "many of these policies lower academic standards and are likely to do long-term damage to the educational equity their advocates purport to advance."

Meme - "All the "bad" kids were absent today
I have a class of 35 kids, and they're all crazy when 3 specific kids I have are there. Today all 3 of them were absent and I have never seem the class so attentive and focused, so disciplined and confident on their routines and drills. I came to the realization that these 3 kids' behaviors don't just disrupt the kids ready to learn, but also distract the ones who aren't necessarily problematic but turn them into "bad" kids too."
Clearly it's the adults' fault, because they are the adults

Wisconsin Democrat says parents who want 'a say' in children's education should homeschool or pay for private - "Democratic State Rep. Lee Snodgrass of Wisconsin was forced to apologize Thursday after writing on social media that parents who want to have control over their children's education need to home school them on their own dime.  "If parents want to 'have a say' in their child's education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget," the legislator tweeted... "I deleted my Tweet since it was lacking in nuance and easily misinterpreted. I wouldn't want anyone to think that parents do not have a role in their child's public education-I sure did. I encourage all parents to engage in voting for school board, join PTO and meet with teachers." "To clarify, My point is we should be fully funding our public schools and that diverting funds away from our public schools only makes it harder for parents to have the relationships we deserve with our kids’ teachers and their schools.""
You cannot interfere with left wing brainwashing
Left wingers want to ban private schools and homeschooling anyway
Clearly, schools are only "fully funded" when all students get 100% for their grade

Meme - "I'm a teacher. If I had time to indoctrinate your students, they'd be wearing deodorant and turn off their cell phones."
"So if one priest tells us that he doesn't molest kids that proves no priests molest kids? Glad we got that clear!"

Student, 11, sent mom selfie after English teacher 'TAPED his mouth up to stop him from talking' - "An eleven-year-old North Carolina student allegedly had his mouth taped shut by his sixth-grade English teacher after talking too much in class.  Catherine Webster received a text from her son Brady in February saying 'I don't know what to do' with an image of himself with layers of blue painter's tape stuck to his mouth during class at Smithfield Middle School, Johnston County.  Horrified by the image of her son who she described to be a 'chatterbox' who has a 'tendency to clown around', Catherine posted the shocking image to Facebook to bring to light her son's story and his interaction with Dawn Felix who she refers to as 'Mrs. Felix' in the post... Felix is said to be an international teacher, although it's unclear where she hails from. She has since resigned from her job, and allegedly been stripped of her visa, meaning she would no longer be able to work in the US."

i/o on X - "A point I make to conservatives who claim that test scores show "US schools are failing" is that US Asians and whites are near the top in international achievement, ranked 3rd and 7th, respectively, on the PISA.   The dismal US average score (26th) is the result of the lousy performance of blacks (53rd) and Hispanics (42nd)."
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "And the top Asian performers are not comparable, meaning, either small city-states or B-S-J-Z, which means taking the most educated people in China, rather than the nation as a whole."

Columbia Prep students, parents reel from 'porn literacy' class - "Parents at the posh Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School are outraged they were never told of a fourth “R” being added to the curriculum: raunch.  In addition to the usual reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the school this month launched lessons on porn — without informing families or allowing them to opt out, parents fumed.  When juniors at the $47,000-a-year Manhattan school showed up for a health and sexuality workshop, most thought it was “just going to be about condoms or birth control,” a student told The Post.  Instead, it was something called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” taught by Justine Ang Fonte, who’s the director of Health & Wellness at another elite prep school, Dalton... Fonte’s presentation, some of which was seen by The Post, included a list of the most searched pornographic terms of 2019, including “creampie,” “anal,” “gangbang,” “stepmom” and more.  One slide cited various porn genres such as “incest-themed,” consensual or “vanilla,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM” (which included “waterboard electro” torture porn as an example).  “We were all like, ‘What?'” a female student said. “Everyone was texting each other, ‘What the hell is this? It’s so stupid.’ Everyone knows about porn. The worst part of it was that it took place not long before the AP tests and I had to miss both my AP classes for this.” One part of the porn presentation involved something called the “marketability of Only Fans,” the hot new app used mostly for sex work... most of the kids, aged 16 and 17, watched the lesson on Zoom from home — which is what alerted some parents to it — but some were at the school and made to assemble in the gym together to watch it on their laptops.  “We were all so shocked and mortified,” the girl told The Post. “We were all like, ‘Why are they doing this? Why do they think it’s OK?’...   “No one wants to be cancelled or lose their livelihood and that can be done in an instant,” the mother said. “Most parents feel the same way I do about not going public but at the same time we’re incredibly frustrated by what’s going on. None of the parents knew this was planned. We were completely left in the dark. It makes us wonder what else the school is up to.”  Another parent of a middle-schooler at the pre-K-12th-grade school said, “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families. “Why is the school making porn a priority as opposed to physics, art, literature or poetry?” she asked.  Three other parents who spoke to The Post said they asked school administrators to show them content from the presentation after it took place but were rebuffed. One mother sent a letter to the school and was granted a discussion with administrators by Zoom, she said.  “The conversation went nowhere,” she told The Post. “The sophistry was incredible.”...   Fonte’s website says she has “reveled in disrupting health education for 10 years” and frames her “pedagogy through the lens of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s teachings on intersectionality.”...   “This is all part of an orthodoxy that has taken over schools across the country,” a spokesman for FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, told The Post. “Millions of kids are being experimented on with a new curriculum that racializes and sexualizes young children, labels them by traits like skin color, gender or sexual orientation, and tells them the paths of their lives are determined by those traits.”... The mother of a young child at the school told The Post that Columbia Prep is one of the last private schools in the city “not to have gone down the radicalized rabbit hole.” But she said the school is on the verge of hiring a DEI — a diversity, equity and inclusion director. She said parents are banding together to persuade administrators to pause the hire and consider input from organizations like FAIR and FIRE, which advocate for free speech and denounce critical race theory and other so-called “woke” policies... “It’s not about this one class. It’s about the whole radical direction the school is going into.”"
Why do many US schools keep trying to sexualise kids? At least for radicalising them into left wing revolutionaries, they can pretend to be improving the world

'Essentially child pornography': Ohio mayor asks school board to resign over racy writing assignments - "The mayor of Hudson, Ohio, is calling for the resignation of the entire Board of Education after high school seniors were assigned a controversial book with writing assignments that asked them to describe sexual experiences, to pretend they were a serial killer and to describe the taste of beer. "It has come to my attention that your educators are distributing what is essentially child pornography in the classroom," Mayor Craig Shubert said Monday at a board meeting."

Knox Zajac reads aloud from 'pornographic' book at school board meeting - "An 11-year-old in Maine spoke out against “pornographic” content in his middle school and wants the administrators to be prosecuted.  Knox Zajac, an 11-year-old sixth-grader, spoke up at a school board meeting last week to read aloud from the book “Nick and Charlie” that he had checked out of his school’s library. The age advisory in this book is 14 years and older.  “Nick and Charlie,” written by Alice Oseman, begins with two early teen boys stealing wine from their parents and proceeding to experiment sexually with one another...   Knox proceeded to read, “My back over my hips. I asked if he should take his clothes off. He was saying yes before I finished my sentence. He’s pulling off my T-shirt, laughing when I can’t undo his shirt buttons. He’s undoing my belt. I’m reaching into his bedside drawer for a condom.”  Knox read more of the sexually explicit material in the book.  “When I rented it out and showed my dad it, the librarian asked if I wanted more and if I wanted a graphic novel version,” Knox said. Knox’s father, Adam, spoke up to address the Board of Windham Raymond School District, also known as RSU-14.  Adam proceeded to blast the book “Gender Queer,” which also shows sexually explicit depictions of two minors. The age advisory in the book is for readers 18 years and older... “We do not need to be having literature that is showing boys how to s–k d–k … you may think the schools know what’s best for our children. You know who knows best for our children? The parents.”"

When Teachers Are Tough Graders, Students Learn More, Study Says - "A new study finds that students perform better on end-of-year standardized tests when their teachers are tough graders—and argues that the “mindset that says ‘everybody gets a gold star’ does more damage than good.”... this effect holds true for students across racial and ethnic groups, gender, socioeconomic makeup, and previous academic background. The study also found evidence of longer-term learning gains for students... In recent years, many educators have been rethinking how they assign grades. Some have shifted to standards-based grading, in which the teacher gives detailed feedback for each assignment and students’ performance is measured against specific course standards for mastery of the content. There’s also competency-based learning, which allows students to progress at different rates based on how well they’ve mastered a set of standards or competencies. Some schools have “no zero” policies that say the lowest score a student can receive on an assignment is a 50, at times even when a student fails to turn anything in. (The idea there is that a zero can tank a student’s chances of passing the course.) And some teachers have even ditched the gradebook altogether, in favor of giving students detailed feedback on their performance throughout the year and working with students to jointly assign a final report card grade, when the school requires it. Many of these educators say that the traditional A-F system doesn’t inspire students to learn for the sake of learning, and that letter grades are too heavily based on nonacademic factors, like punctuality and compliance. They say that grades can stress students out and cause others—particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds—to give up. Even so, Gershenson said his study found “zero evidence” that high grading standards hurt students. There is no effect on high school graduation, although this might be because students who are taking Algebra 1 in 8th or 9th grade are already unlikely to drop out. The study also found some evidence that having a teacher with higher grading standards can slightly increase students’ intent to attend a four-year college or university, although this result is only marginally statistically significant. “That contradicts the concern that kids are going to get discouraged by having a realistic grade,” Gershenson said. And his study did not find any significant differences between students’ backgrounds: “No matter how you slice it, everybody benefits” from high grading standards, he said. He also found that grading standards tend to be higher in suburban schools and schools serving more affluent students. In the study, Gershenson wrote that this points to what President George W. Bush once called “soft bigotry of low expectations.”"
Clearly, we need more equity, and we need to listen to teachers, who are absolutely infallible in what they claim about education

Testing with accountability improves student achievement - "In a new study (Bergbauer et al. 2018), we use international contrasts to estimate the effects of different types and dimensions of student assessments on overall levels of student achievement. This expands research studying determinants of student achievement in a cross-country setting (Hanushek and Woessmann 2011 and Woessmann 2016 provide reviews). International comparisons make it possible to consider how overall institutional structures interact with the specifics of student assessments and school accountability systems. This cross-country approach allows us to investigate which aspects of student assessment systems generalise to larger settings, and which do not. Of course, identifying the impact of schooling policies across nations is challenging. Our empirical analysis exploits the increasing amount of international student assessment data. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), tests the mathematics, science, and reading skills of representative samples of 15-year-old students. It provides a panel of country observations of student performance. We pool the micro data of more than two million students in 59 countries who participated in six PISA waves between 2000 and 2015... Because there was rapid change in student assessment policies across countries between 2000 and 2015, we can link policies to outcomes in panel models that include fixed effects for country and year. That is, the estimation ignores any level differences across countries, and uses only changes in student assessment regimes that happen within countries, over time. By building on an analysis of school autonomy in Hanushek et al. (2013), we use the individual student data for estimation at the micro level, but measure our treatment variables as country aggregates at each point to avoid bias from within-country selection of students into schools. Conditioning on country and year fixed effects allows us to account for unobserved time-invariant country characteristics, as well as common time-specific shocks. Our models further condition on a rich set of student, school, and country measures. The key identifying assumption of our analysis is the standard assumption of fixed-effects panel models. In the absence of reform, the change in achievement in countries that introduced assessments would have been similar to the change in achievement in countries that did not reform (conditional on the included control variables)... countries that expanded the use of standardised testing for external comparisons have systematically seen the average math achievement of their students improve, compared to countries that did not expand (or even reduced) this type of testing. By contrast, changes in the use of internal testing are not systematically associated with changes in student achievement across countries... We also perform a placebo analysis. The use of standardised external comparisons has a significant positive effect on student achievement in the year in which they are implemented, but not in the previous wave. This also indicates that how a country has performed in the past does not predict whether it will implement an assessment reform. This implies it is not likely that endogeneity of assessment reforms to how a school system is performing is a concern for our results. Further robustness analyses show that results are not affected by any individual country, or by changes in PISA testing procedures, and that they are robust to subsets of countries, and when we control for test exclusion rates."
This is why the teachers hate standardised tests so much. I saw one pretending that there was no research on the effect standardised testing had

Breanna Morello on X - "Here’s just some of the demands the Chicago Teachers Union is reportedly making:
-Fully paid abortions
-45 paid days off
-Housing for illegal migrants
-A salary increase from $93,182 to $144,620 by 2027
-More LGBTQ+ annual training
MEANWHILE, only 21% of the Chicago’s eighth graders are proficient in reading."
Clearly, US schools need even more money to raise student achievement

Cotton picking lesson leaves Black middle school students reeling in Spokane - "It’s been almost a month since Emzayia and Zyeshauwne Feazell, 14-year-old twins, have stopped attending classes at Sacajawea Middle School in Spokane. That’s when, they said, an activity in their 8th grade social studies class left them feeling hurt, angry, and traumatized. The class was in the middle of a unit about industrial economics. As part of a classroom activity, their teacher pulled out a box of raw cotton and told the class they were going to do a “fun” activity to see who could clean the cotton the fastest."
Interactive history lessons are bad. If they had been excluded, it'd have been racist too
How come "white fragility" is never as bad as this?
Of course, if you are upset at a McCarthy-themed lesson, you are kicking up a big fuss over nothing

i/o on X - ""Large racial disparities in academic test performance are due to socioeconomic factors"
Percentage of Asian public school students in NYC living in poverty: 24% Black students: 21%
Asian public school students in NYC proficient in math in 2022: 68% Black students: 21%
It should be noted that the lousy black math proficiency percentage in NYC is actually higher than it is in most large American cities with a sizable black population."
Clearly, Asians benefit from white privilege

Meme - Kit Hart, American Girl @5sweetharts_: "Is she referring to J6, 2021??  If so, the leader of the largest teachers union in the US cannot count.  Is it any wonder American students are struggling? .@Moms4Liberty  @ConceptualJames"
Becky Pringle @BeckyPringle: "Two years ago today, our democracy came under violent threat at the United States Capitol. Let it be a reminder to fiercely protect and defend our freedom to vote, and to never take for granted the right to choose our leaders.
Jan 7, 2024"

Seattle closes gifted and talented schools because they had too many white and Asian students, with consultant branding black parents who complained about move 'tokenized' - "Seattle has shuttered its gifted and talented programs because the school board determined they had too many white and Asian students... parents of black students in the Highly Capable Cohort asked the board to consider finding ways to incorporate students of color into the gifted program rather than shut it down. Then school board vice president Chandra Hampson slammed those parents saying, 'this is a pretty masterful job at tokenizing a really small community of color within the existing cohort.'... 'The program does more for black children, particularly black boys, than it does for their peers.'... The gifted and talented program has been replaced with the Highly Capable Neighborhood School Model which requires teachers to come up with individualized learning programs for all of their students."
The left hates success and achievement, after all

70 years ago, school integration was a dream many believed could actually happen. It hasn't
Of course, they pretend that it's all about funding, as usual, and conflating segregation and self-segregation, and want to bus students around even after 7 decades

blog comments powered by Disqus
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Latest posts (which you might not see on this page)

powered by Blogger | WordPress by Newwpthemes