Wednesday, November 21, 2018






Students reportedly took a College Republicans chapter’s signs at a California State University campus, saying they were “inaccurate.”

The incident occurred at California State University, Chico, where some of the signs were allegedly taken while another sign was said to have been destroyed. CSU Chico’s College Republicans Executive Director Michael Curry said the signs claimed three liberal council candidates “want to raise gas prices” and “ignore [the] homeless problem,” Campus Reform reported Monday.

Curry told The Daily Caller News Foundation over Facebook messenger the incident happened on “Tuesday Election Day,” which was on Nov. 6.

Curry is heard asking the women what they were doing with the signs originally in the ground, according to video footage obtained by Campus Reform.

One of them replied, “We’re taking them — ” while another interrupted and agreed, adding, “Yeah, this is so inaccurate.”

The girls said they were moving the signs after Curry told them they were not allowed to take them out due to free speech rights.

“Why are you allowed to rip ’em [signs] out of our hands?” one of the girls asked Curry.

“They are our signs, not yours — ours,” Curry said.

Some other students also told the girls the College Republicans had the right to place the signs on campus.

Another woman in a separate incident allegedly threw the organization’s sign, Campus Reform reported. (RELATED: Florida Student Who Allegedly Threw Chocolate Milk On Students At College Republicans Event Charged With Battery)

She allegedly tried to grab Curry’s phone to push it away.

Curry told TheDCNF he is in the process of filing a report and that there were “no consequences as of now for the students.”

“I hope with the hardships our community is going through currently we can look past partisan politics and work together to get through this challenging time,” Curry said to TheDCNF.

The Chico City Council candidates backed by liberals were Alex Brown, Scott Huber and Rich Ober, according to the Chico Enterprise-Record.

“The events of the election are now behind us,” Chico State Republicans said to The DCNF. “In light of the recent disaster affecting a large portion of Butte County, we have no comments on election day activities at this time.”

The school is located about 90 miles north of Sacramento, California. The Northern California area has been hit with the Camp Fire, a deadly wildfire that has destroyed more than 6,700 buildings.

CSU Chico did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.

SOURCE 






Scotland used to have the best schools system in the world. Then devolution happened

Once one of the best in the world, Scotland’s education system has been steadily marching backwards for the past ten years. From the outside, it seems baffling: why, given that Scottish spending per pupil is among the highest in the world, are things going so wrong? From the inside, it’s far easier to understand. You can explain it in three words: Curriculum for Excellence.

I’d heard stories about it before I started training as a teacher. By the time I qualified — in April last year — how I wished I’d listened to them. The story starts in 2010, when the new system was introduced with four aims: to create ‘confident individuals’, ‘successful learners’, ‘responsible citizens’ and ‘effective contributors’. Perhaps the meaning of these phrases was clear to those who came up with them. But as I found out, many teachers can’t recall — let alone explain — them.

Picture a grey Glasgow sky and underneath, a cosy school staffroom. ‘What are they called again? Successful contributors? Effective learners?’ one teacher with 30 years’ experience asks. ‘No, no. It is the learners who are successful; the contributors are effective!’ a student teacher replies helpfully.

The idea of teaching had been turned on its head. Rather than stick to a topic — like English or chemistry — we had to mix them up according to a bizarre formula created in the devolved parliament. In 1999, the new MSPs had been given power over the school system — so decided to use it. When the SNP came to power, the shake-up began. Devolution made a nation’s children into guinea pigs.

So instead of straightforward maths lessons, we’d have ‘interdisciplinary learning’. Bar charts would be shoehorned into lessons about Shakespeare. For a teacher to perform ‘active learning’, the ‘learners’ had to be constantly entertained. Then came the demand for ‘collaborative learning’, which means group work, where nothing gets done.

Exams were to be judged by classwork, which of course created plenty of scope for foul play. And not only by pupils. One experienced teacher told me of ‘the pass factory’ in her school, a place where pupils go for unlimited attempts on core assessments. Gaming the system is particularly noticeable in middle-class areas, where children pay for private tutors in order to be coached through exams. In some cases, tutors actually write the coursework for them.

In English, graphic novels crept their way into classrooms. Literature and media studies were fused. Presumably to cater for this, Penguin even published an emoji series of Shakespeare’s plays. This is new, certainly, but is it progress? Glaring ignorance of world geography or history is not just permissible, but expected. In history, for example, it’s normal for pupils to study the second world war year after year, and merely be assessed at different levels, constant assessment being the SNP’s only guarantee. The number of pupils studying French or German has halved.

All of this was supposed to empower teachers and give them more say. But the SNP failed to do its homework, and it didn’t quite turn out like that. And so, despite teachers’ sceptical willingness, the whole project has become seen as a sick joke. In the staffroom, the Curriculum for Excellence is known as the ‘curriculum for excrement’.

My final teaching exam led me to cater my lesson to the 20 pupils in front of me, of whom 18 had various ‘additional support’ needs (autism, dyslexia etc). Trying to fulfil the curriculum’s bizarre demands on top of these challenges made my lesson a circus. In the end, I qualified. But I walked away from teacher training with a smoking habit and a resolution never to return. I later found out that four in ten newly qualified teachers leave the profession within a year. Which is a tragedy: all of my fellow trainees entered wanting to help pupils, as we had been helped. But it’s hard, once you find out that you’ll be taking part in the dumbing-down of a nation’s schools and the betrayal of its children.

I know quite a few of the dropouts now. There’s the Frenchman with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, who stormed out of our school placement after a disagreement about the quality of his teaching. A fellow secondary school teacher who, due to unmanageable stress, now tutors young offenders rather than return to the classroom. A once enthusiastic primary teacher who said to me, ‘I’d rather do anything — anything — than go back.’ At the last count, there were almost 700 vacant teaching posts in Scotland. That’s around 21,000 pupils who are missing teachers.

In the staffroom of one school where I taught, there was a poster. It read, ‘Being a teacher is easy. It’s like riding a bike. Except the bike is on fire. You’re on fire. Everything is on fire. And you’re in hell.’ Sometimes, on breaks between classes, I would sit and stare at it. I did not see the funny side; for the teachers, or for the pupils, who are the principal victims of a system that is so visibly failing.

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Australian Principals at ‘breaking point’ as they struggle with violent parents and high stress

Teachers and principals across the country say they are at breaking point, too stressed from their workloads, pressures within the education system and abusive or violent parents.

In the worst cases teachers are attempting suicide or suffering major heart attacks.

Serious concerns are being raised over the mental health of Australian educators, with an “unprecedented” number of principals at risk.

Principals say parents are to blame and are calling for a national code of conduct to stop the abuse they face.

At St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney’s CBD one student had to be expelled last year because things between parents and a staff member became so bad.

In Victoria teachers say that have been forced to get the police to intervene.

Ann Marie Kliman, president of Victorian Principals Association, said she was physically assaulted by a student’s father.

On the Gold Coast principals have reported parents pulling knives on them, with one even threatening to ram their “head into concrete”.

The crisis across the country is subject of debate, with many teachers claiming it is the principals who are abusive towards them.

But Australian Primary Principals Association president Dennis Yarrington said aggressive and abusive parents were the biggest issue.

But he said the problem was indicative of a societal issue and has called for a national code of conduct for parents.

“It’s very concerning and even though there are a number of states and territories implementing support, there’s still more to be done,” Mr Yarrington said.

“We really need to crank up the focus that this is a community issue so we need a community response.

“It’s the behaviour of parents and community members that we feel is totally unacceptable.

“We want this issue raised as a national topic that needs a response from departments and communities.”

Mr Yarrington said just as students were asked to call out other bullies, they wanted parents to call out inappropriate behaviour too.

“If parents continue to role model it in front of children it makes it very hard for schools to try and change that behaviour,” he said.

The problem is so bad, principal wellbeing researcher Phil Riley said he had received dozens of “red flag” alerts from those taking part in his annual survey.

The Australian Catholic University education expert said one-in-three school principals who took part in the survey had been flagged this year — the worst he had ever seen.

Participants get red flagged if they answer questions indicating they are at risk.

The survey included questions over their quality of life, their psychosocial risk and whether they had felt like harming themselves in the last week.

“That’s unprecedented, we’ve never had anything like that before,” Dr Riley said. “Every year it’s getting worse and worse.”

The Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey indicates whether staff are burning out, having sleeping problems or are depressed.

“It’s pretty rough, and it’s uniform across the country, across the whole system,” Dr Riley.

About a third of principals across the country take part in the survey, which in previous years has also revealed alarming results.

Last year, Dr Riley indicated a “worrying trend” around the increase in stress caused by mental health issues among staff and students over the last six years.

“This is a worrying trend that goes well beyond the school gate,” he wrote.

“The costs associated with this trend were recently estimated to be $10.9 billion annually. As

the education workforce is very large, a significant proportion of these costs could be saved.

“PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia reported a 2.3 return on investment when organisations addressed the issues directly. It appears foolhardy not to do so in the education sector.”

His report also revealed 44 per cent of principals had been threatened with violence.

Principals are at the top end of a mental health crisis that is appears to be systemic across the education sector. News.com.au has spoken to several formers teachers across the country who have been forced to leave their profession because of stress and bullying.

Current teachers said they were struggling with high workloads and pressures from NAPLAN requirements but were too scared to speak out.

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