They’re Americans; they aren’t that crafty.
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What color are these students of color as they seem to have named everyone? I mean, the only color that’s left is… white. So they should just have said every student.
Anyway, it appears to me the Democratic party has come up with a new form of Jim Crow masked in benevolence. They went from keeping blacks from voting to keeping blacks from thinking. Just look at that blond kid in the back clapping and smiling; he’s thinking you all will be working for me one day.
I find that really fucking insulting
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You should, because it definitely is.
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Ha! I doubt he’s thinking that…probably more like, “You will be my pets one day.”
I would too.
Most forms of affirmative action are usually advanced by people who benefit from the presence of minorities, not necessarily the success of minorities.
Whose success and wellbeing do you think a teacher is thinking about when handing a high school diploma to a child who can barely read, write coherently or do math?
The student’s, or their own?
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The teacher did not come up with the policy and probably doesn’t agree with it. Now, someday that will change as those with the real power in education policy manage to indoctrinate future teachers while still in college.
This is one area where I disagree with Thomas Sowell, but to be fair, he is not an expert on everything. He once mentioned how in NYC they have a building where teachers who are deemed unfit to teach, but cannot be fired, go to pass the day. He believed it should be easier to terminate these teachers which sounds sensible until you look at why some teachers are deemed unfit. For example, one teacher was pulled from the classroom for refusing to adhere to these woke type of policies. This is not a hanging offense so they simply keep him on the payroll and out of the classroom, probably hoping he will just resign at some point.
In short, getting rid of teacher unions and making it easier to fire teachers, will give even more power to the policy makers who are the ones coming up with all of these stupid ideas that do not work. Because even teachers who are true believers in this nonsense may one day wake up after a few years of seeing how these policies fail year after year.
Well, it’s usually someone from admin, like a principal, handing out diplomas. I worked in a school where the superintendent told teachers to just pass everyone. The truth is, if your child graduates unable to read, it’s your fault for not paying attention. And if you, as a parent, are so uneducated, unprepared and uninvolved to notice your child is illiterate, you shouldn’t have had kids. And this is always the root of all of these issues. But Democrats have chosen their new version of Jim Crow to maintain the status quo.
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That’s the broader point underneath my comment at but I didn’t want to go into detail. You can substitute administrator for teacher in my comment. The point remains that none of it is for the success or well-being of the student.
That said, plenty of teachers definitely buy into the notion that standards for reading, writing and math should vary based on skin color, and they believe they are doing people a favor with this. It is often in the teacher’s interest to pass a student who doesn’t understand the subject matter.
They have been largely correct, as the teacher’s unions have gathered more and more power to negotiate with the American taxpayer in their self-interest over the last few decades. This peaked during covid, and now those kids have to deal with a major handicap with years of lost learning. This loss of learning was specifically advocated for by the teacher’s union.
Various worldviews centered around victimhood have had a major hand in solidifying the Teacher’s Union power and entrenching the ideologies that lead to things like race-based academic standards and believing that young children ought to be instructed that they might be, can be and even should be members of the opposite sex.
Plenty could mean anything. 10%, 40%, 80%? And those that do are most likely younger and were told this when training to become teachers.
They often aren’t given the choice. Sometimes failure is literally not a possibility. There are schools where the lowest possible grade a student can get on any assignment or test, is a 50. They don’t even take a test and it goes in as a 50. They then do one missing assignment or take one test, and they are given multiple chances to take the same test, get a D, and they pass.
Which is something individuals would do if they had any power. So a teacher, in a union, has a union negotiating on his behalf. No union, and that teacher has no negotiating power at all. And this will ultimately lower the quality of teachers available. No one is going to go to college and get a Masters degree to earn 30K a year with crappy benefits. The truth is, no one is going to pay a teacher, regardless of how good he is, 100K a year to start. This idea of paying more to get better teachers is built on a lie. The people in power will always try to cut costs and will hire a poorer teacher for less money. This idea of getting rid of unions, which will lower pay (and it isn’t a lot anyway), will force older, more experienced teachers out and bring in a new crop of indoctrinated teachers who, because they are 22 years old, will see the low salary as acceptable. It’s all a money grab by politicians to redistribute the savings as they see fit.
This is another myth. The kids who did well before Covid, did well after. The kids who were doing poorly continued to do poorly, and a good number of them, to this day, have yet to return to school. In the US, education is judged by the poorest performing districts. It’s like looking at the murder rates in Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, etc., and saying America as a whole has a crime problem and then imposing policies to address that crime on every state and municipality. That’s how we got No Child Left Behind, under Bush, which was a failure.
Whenever I hear a politician talking about unions when addressing education, I see a grifter who doesn’t know anything about reality. If a child cannot read, it has something to with him, his family and even his community. When people start blaming teachers it’s a way to avoid facing the real problems for which they have no solutions. Getting rid of teachers’ unions will make kids in the ghetto suddenly have homes with fathers married to their mothers? They will suddenly stop killing each other? They will suddenly value education and have a work ethic?
Then there is school choice, another scam. Sure, a few kids from the inner cities might find themselves in a good private school but the majority won’t. There are only so many private schools. Also, and more significantly, private schools won’t take many of them. In some of these schools the majority of students are officially labelled special ed. Private schools do not want these kids and are not equipped to teach them (and many are unteachable). No one is going to pay the high tuition for their child to go to class with students who are academically behind and also behaviorally “challenged.”
In communities with good public schools, no one complains about teachers or unions. In communities with under-performing schools (which really means under-performing students), these complaints are raised. I wonder what the real problem is.
Unions don’t dictate curriculum. Neither do teachers. The question is, and I doubt you will have an answer, how does getting rid of teachers unions lead to better student outcomes? Keep in mind that teachers in non union districts and states get paid less, which defies the idea that without unions, schools will negotiate and pay based on merit. No, they undercut. They don’t seek out the best and brightest and pay accordingly. Also, students from unionized districts perform better. Look at Chicago, get rid of unions, lower pay and worsen benefits as a result, and see what kind of people you will attract as teachers. So again, tell me how ending unions will make inner city kids learn?
I’ll give another example: cell phones. We know for a fact that cell phones are having a negative impact on learning. It’s not even debatable. Yet, in spite of knowing that cell phones are a problem in schools, how many parents would support banning them? Think about that; a parent knows that cell phones in school are hurting his child’s learning yet doesn’t have the courage to not allow his kid to bring it to school. As individuals, parents are unwilling to make a supposed difficult choice. Schools, because they know how parents will react, are unwilling to make that choice. In France, on the other hand, the government banned phones in schools. Blaming teachers and/or unions is just a way for people to avoid looking in the mirror and admitting they suck as parents and their kids are morons. It’s also a way for politicians to pander to these people. That is simply another manifestation of victimhood and the blame game. Parents and those in power never want to accept any responsibility for the results of their actions.
Maybe everything you said is true, but I don’t see any data that suggests that the teachers union or our current model of public education is improving student outcomes.
All of the data I have seen suggests that remote learning was a disaster. I know if no parents who felt it was remotely equivalent to a normal classroom. I’m sure the teachers who advocated for it have some means to justify it for the duration it went on for.
You can blame a lot of people for the state of education, but that doesn’t speak to the wisdom of continuing on our present path, let alone on doubling down on more race based standards.
High school seemed to be rather sensible when i attended. Priorities have clearly changed since then.
I’ll vouch for this. My kid didn’t miss a beat. Why not? Parental involvement. In fact, his main teacher was a woke moron with some greatest hits such as:
Using BLM materials in the lessons.
Telling kids that the colonist commited genocide and murdered the American Indians.
MLK advocated for the use of violence in protest.
Wouldn’t even acknowledge any typical American holidays.
Refused to lead the Pledge of Allegiance.
She has since been let go. The district and the teachers in it are all pretty well grounded. A lot of them are veterans/reserve and spouses of veterans/ reservists.
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The rhetoric with regard to Covid isn’t that it created problems but that it exacerbated existing ones.
Texas, pre Covid, had a chronic absentee rate of over 10%. There are over 5 million students in Texas which means there were over 500 thousand kids who were regularly not in school.
You’re in PA so they are probably union members.
That’s two separate matters that should not be linked. Even if the unions have no effect one way or another on educational outcomes, they do have an effect on employees; their pay and well-being. Things that non union districts have shown they care little for. We both know that in life, you get what you pay for.
And who signed that piece of legislation? A teacher or a governor?
Yeah. I’m pretty sure all public school teachers in Pa are.
Private & corporate are not necessarily though.
How is that woke? That’s just reality.
Second graders. Cuz part of being woke is telling the “truth” no matter how much it hurts 7-8 year olds.
So, instead of the typical second grade “Pilgrims came over on the mayflower. Yay!Turkey! Lets make hats.” They got told about genocide, murder, disease and death.
Which is true. I’ll give you that. But for second graders?
It was too much. And one of many reasons she ain’t a teacher no more.
We had the same issue here until recently. From 2nd grade Russian communist propaganda told us that for 5 centuries, we ve been slaves to Ottomans and were told about mass murders and etc. But the good old Ruskies have come to save us.
It’s a judgment on real events. Murder is a legal conclusion. Genocide is also a conclusion that is based on the subjective perception of factual evidence. Did colonists kill Indians? Yes. Does that make it murder? What were the laws at the time? Under what circumstances were the killings committed?
Did the colonists commit or attempt genocide? Genocide, the term, was invented in the 1940s to define what the Nazis did in Europe; so to refer to what happened a few centuries prior with a term that was invented much later, requires contextualization. You’re applying 20the century thinking to 17th century people. The UN has come up with a definition of genocide but can we judge people who lived in a world without a UN by UN standards?
What the woke crowd, including woke educators, fail to grasp, because they typically are not educated but indoctrinated; they are fundamentalists who follow an orthodoxy and demagoguery, is that right and wrong are mutable concepts. Judging actions and judging the actors should not always be mutually inclusive acts. The woke, in fact, and this points out their hypocrisy and uneducated thinking, do this all of the time when they separate the criminal (usually an “oppressed” POC) from the crime. George Floyd was a violent criminal. He was a garbage person who took part in the sexual exploitation of young women. Yet, the woke elevate that scumbag to martyr and saint. They build statues and create murals to honor him. He, as a person, doesn’t get judged by how he lived his life, which was as a lowlife, but by how he was killed.
If they want to teach reality, then include how Indians owned black slaves. Teach that they had slavery prior to the arrival of Europeans. Teach that the Spanish were greedy, bloodthirsty colonists looking for gold while teaching the Aztecs (technically the Mexihcah) were also invaders and colonizers who practiced slavery, cannibalism and mass murder, including the mass murder of children, after they had been tortured for days (their god needed to quench his thirst with their tears). The Mexihcah were so violent and feared, the other indigenous people in the area who were their victims allied with the Spanish to defeat them.
So the problem is picking those parts of reality that suit a narrative. This is not education or scholarship but propaganda. It’s no different than Fox or CNN who take particular facts and tell their audience how to perceive them. The last thing any of these fundamentalists want is a populace that can use reason.
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You should see how they teach The Little Engine That Could. It’s now a story about a climate killing coal burning machine that runs on rails built by exploited people of color because white supremacy. “I think I can,” is an expression of white privilege because if the Engine were a POC, woman or LGBTQ, he/she/they would have said, “I know I can’t.”
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Rofl!
See, after witnessing the way that some will twist that stuff up, I can’t tell if you’re joking or not. 
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I don’t know why I sometimes read these articles but this one really says something about Americans. These fat people go to a country like France, which has fewer fat people than the US, and complain that the country can’t adequately accommodate their “larger” (they mean fat) bodies. I’m starting to think that obesity is the result of mental illness.