Monday, February 28, 2022



Oakland’s Educational Bureaucrats Steamroll Parents and Kids

Oaklanders are mainly black so the bureaucrats probably thought they might not be likely to protest

Conversations with some of California’s most vulnerable families show they have become the targets of increasingly autocratic officials entrusted with the education of their children

The pandemic kind of destroyed my kids,” Maplean told me. Her son, Da’vine, is 17 years old and a high school junior in Oakland. “Kids like him have to be in school,” she said. “It was really, really rough for him doing online classes. It put him back even farther than what he was.”

Last year, Oakland saw a surge in shootings, assaults, and homicides. Maplean tries to keep her kids home not only because she is still concerned about COVID, but also due to the increased threat of gun violence in their neighborhood—itself a product of policies that put school-age kids at risk by disrupting normal patterns of socialization for the most vulnerable.

“For the kids that don’t have anything to do with their lives, don’t have any support groups, of course they’re going to go out there and think it’s OK to start doing more violence,” Maplean told me.

Everything that was hard before COVID is worse now in Oakland. Prices are higher, and as a single parent Maplean feels the financial strain. “I used to take my kids out a lot,” she said. “Now I have to be really cautious. Money-wise, I just don’t have it.”

Maplean thinks masks, testing, and other mitigation measures were necessary for schools to reopen, but she knows that virtual learning took an emotional toll on her son. Da’vine once took pride in his schoolwork and good grades, so falling behind had an impact on his self-esteem. “He comes home and tells me he doesn’t know how to do the work,” Maplean said. Wealthy people “are able to make sure their kids get the education that they need, but what about the less fortunate ones? What about us?”

The San Francisco Bay Area, where Maplean lives, was once considered a center of tolerance and personal freedom. Since the pandemic began, it has become notorious for its inequality and dysfunction, brought about in part by rigid and often evidence-free COVID policies. In San Francisco and other Bay Area cities, unvaccinated people—including children—are barred from restaurants, movie theaters, gyms, and other indoor spaces. Schools in the Bay Area were closed for longer than almost everywhere else in the country, making the experience of children and parents in the educational system where I once worked an ongoing experiment in the costs of isolation and desocialization for some of the most disadvantaged children and families in America.

Like Los Angeles, some parts of the Bay Area tried to implement COVID vaccine requirements in schools but were forced to postpone them when thousands of kids didn’t meet the deadlines. Gov. Gavin Newsom has also recently announced an upcoming statewide mandate for children in grades 7-12, making California the only U.S. state in which COVID vaccines will be a condition for in-person school next year. The state legislature is currently set to vote on bills that would expand the mandate to include grades K-6, eliminate personal-belief exemptions, and enable kids 12 and up to get vaccinated without parental consent. Although the stereotype persists that only white Trump voters are unvaccinated, the Black and Latino residents of blue California have the lowest levels of vaccine uptake for both adults and teens.

What They Did to the Kids

Many of the parents I spoke with in order to better understand the toll of COVID mandates—imposed in many cases with little to no scientific consensus about their likely efficacy—are working-class mothers whom I know from when I was a public school teacher in Oakland. They preferred that I only use their first names, which makes sense, given their vulnerability to the whims of an increasingly autocratic, intolerant, and punitive bureaucracy that has shown no interest in putting kids or families first.

None of the parents I spoke with described themselves as “anti-vax.” Their kids have received all of their regular childhood vaccines, and some of their kids have been vaccinated against COVID, but they believe the COVID vaccines should be a personal choice. They spoke to me about the losses they have experienced, how school closures affected their families, and the ways in which institutions they once trusted have failed them. This is about much more than a school policy or a vaccine: It’s about the fact that parents have been sidelined, ignored, and left out of crucial decisions about their children’s lives. Their experiences and opinions about COVID and COVID restrictions are all different, but they share the same overwhelming sense that something in our state is going terribly wrong.

Even though Maplean often worries about her kids’ safety at school, she doesn’t support the vaccine mandate. “It’s not up to the school district,” she said. “It’s actually up to us parents.” At first Maplean did not want to get her kids vaccinated, but she’s glad she did. Her daughter has allergies, so Maplean brought an EpiPen with them to the vaccination site and was nervous that she would have to use it if her daughter had a reaction. Because of this, she understands why some parents have anxiety about the vaccines.

To date, 30% of students 12 and up in Oakland public schools have not verified their vaccination status, even though the district threatened to unenroll them or put them into “independent study” (online learning). “I just feel like the school district is pushing parents, especially African Americans, to force them to get their kids vaccinated,” Maplean said. As for why she thinks Black students have lower rates of vaccination, their parents “don’t trust too many people in Oakland. We as African Americans have trust issues with certain things of what we put in our kids’ bodies. I have that issue too.” Some of this hesitancy may be connected to the fact that COVID deaths have disproportionately affected minorities. Maplean feels that the city and the hospital system failed to provide adequate care: “They said ‘Forget these people, they’re going to die anyway’… And why? It’s because we’re poor.”

Ofelia, whose sons Jesus, 17, and Cesar, 16, are in high school in San Leandro, told me that it feels like the state’s approach to COVID has been like a lab experiment. “They have no control, so they’re trying to put everyone in a box,” she told me. “They’re saying, ‘Let’s see if this works, and if this doesn’t work, then we’ll try this, and then if that doesn’t work, then we’ll try this.’” During online learning, her sons’ school and their teachers did as much as they could to help them, but it was still challenging. “Emotionally, I think they checked out after the first month,” Ofelia said.

Ofelia was already under the worst possible strain; her other son died suddenly in June 2020 at age 24. “I can’t remember a lot of it because I was so distraught,” she told me, “but because of the pandemic we couldn’t have a decent rosary for him and we couldn’t have a vigil for him.” Only 10 people could attend the funeral and they had to stay 6 feet apart. It was difficult to get any emotional support. “That was really hard because I have a big family,” she said. “It was really hard to go through that and still have so much restrictions … You don’t realize that you’re going to have this loss in your family and then to still be so confined and you can’t do anything. It just makes it 10 times worse.”

Ofelia did not oppose the lockdown or the school closures because she felt that so much was uncertain, and both of her sons got the COVID vaccine. However, she does not think it should be mandatory. “This was something that I think they were throwing on everyone,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of research about it. And it was not a choice. At this point it’s not your choice to get it—it’s either you get it or you can’t go into the restaurant to eat … Either you get it or you can’t go to school.” Ofelia told me that she has family members who passed away from COVID, but she firmly believes vaccination should be a personal decision. “Everybody has their reasonings,” she said.

More here:

********************************************

W.Va.: House Judiciary Committee Delays Action on ‘Anti-Stereotyping’ Bill

With three days until the deadline when bills must be out of committees, lawmakers dove into a bill Thursday dealing with discussions of race and gender in West Virginia classrooms.

The House Judiciary Committee discussed House Bill 4011, the Anti-Stereotyping Act. The committee heard details of the bill for more than an hour, but put off any action on the bill until later today.

HB 4011 would require greater curriculum transparency for public schools pertaining to non-discrimination, diversity, equity, inclusion, race, ethnicity, sex, bias or any combination of those concepts. The bill also would prohibit the teaching and discussion of specific racial and non-discrimination topics often categorized under the name critical race theory, or CRT.

The bill states that no person should be blamed for the action committed in the past by someone of the same race, sex, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Schools and county board of education officials would be prohibited from compelling students and staff to adopt any belief or concept that one race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior to another.

The House Education Committee recommended the bill for passage Feb. 3 after a contentious discussion that ultimately ended with Republicans on the committee moving to end further debate and vote on the bill.

The House Education and Judiciary committees held a public hearing on the bill Feb. 9, where 23 out of 25 attendees spoke out against the bill.

Del. Lisa Zukoff, D-Marshall, asked how does someone determine if a teacher has compelled a student to learn something prohibited by the bill.

“Where it seems worrisome to me is it seems so broad,” Zukoff said. “How do you prove and how do you determine whether this has actually happened?”

Del. Mark Zatezalo, R-Hancock, asked about a complaint from opponents of the bill that it would prohibit the teaching or discussion of certain historical topics in the classroom, such as discussions of slavery, segregation, and civil rights. Counsel for the committee explained that there was nothing in the bill prohibiting the teaching of history.

“I didn’t hear anything that spoke to any degree whatsoever about history or the teaching of history,” Zatezalo said.

Del. Joe Garcia, D-Marion, pointed to a provision of the bill that would prohibit teachers or administrators from compelling students or employees from adopting a belief that “An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined, in whole or in part, by his or her race, sex, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.”

“I just find it weird,” Garcia said. “An individual might be Adolph Hitler and you cannot discuss Adolph Hitler’s moral character as it relates to the history of what happened in Nazi Germany.”

While the bill doesn’t mention Critical Race Theory (CRT) by name, the bill is aimed at prohibiting the teaching of concepts derived from CRT, such as the anti-racism philosophies found in the works of Ibrim X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Examples include teaching that racism is systemic regardless of whether a child believes they are not racist, saying that race-blind standards are inherently racist, and calling white students “oppressors.”

Todd Gaziano, the chief of legal policy and strategic research and the director of the Center for the Separation of Powers at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, testified that HB 4011 is very narrowly tailored and said some legislation in other states are too broad and restrictive. HB 4011 is based on model legislation offered by the foundation.

“When I was advising on some of the language … we were extremely careful about making sure that this was well grounded in federal law, but particularly well grounded in the First Amendment,” Gaziano said. “Certainly, you could condemn Nazis. That’s not a whole race. Could you condemn slaveholders? You should condemn slaveholders.

“No one should have any problem with this (bill), but if you do, you have a problem with federal law,” Gaziano continued. “What you can’t say is … all whites, by virtue of being white, have certain moral failings. But that is what is being taught … there are school systems with curriculum that say because of the virtue of the color of your skin you are an oppressor.”

*********************************************

Why Don’t Universities Protect Freedom of Speech?

In 2017, Georgetown University revised its speech and expression policy to reflect an institutional commitment to freedom of speech on campus. The new policy committed the University to provide students and faculty with “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” The policy specifically declared that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived,” and that the University undertook “a solemn responsibility not only to promote a lively and fearless freedom of deliberation and debate, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.”

That same year, Love Saxa, a campus group that advocated for marriage as “a monogamous and permanent union between a man and a woman,” was accused of being a hate group because of this definition, and threatened with defunding. In 2019, the Acting Homeland Security Secretary, who had been invited to deliver an address at the law school, was repeatedly shouted down by protestors and forced to leave without delivering his speech. The law school administration took no action to stop the protestors. In 2021, the dean of the law school summarily fired an adjunct professor for what he described as an “abhorrent” conversation in which she made “reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students.” He placed another adjunct professor on administrative leave for merely listening to these comments without disagreeing.

Last week, Ilya Shapiro, the incoming director of the law school’s Center for the Constitution expressed his opinion of President Biden’s decision to appoint an African-American woman to the Supreme Court on Twitter. In the abbreviated language needed to fit his comments into 280 characters, he stated: “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?” In a follow-up tweet, he stated, “Because Biden said he’s only consider [sic] black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.”

The dean of Georgetown Law responded to these tweets with a campus-wide e-mail in which he stated that Shapiro’s “tweets’ suggestion that the best Supreme Court nominee could not be a Black woman and their use of demeaning language are appalling. The tweets are at odds with everything we stand for at Georgetown Law and are damaging to the culture of equity and inclusion that Georgetown Law is building every day.” Three days later, he issued a second campus-wide e-mail stating: “Ilya Shapiro’s tweets are antithetical to the work that we do here every day to build inclusion, belonging, and respect for diversity. . . . I am writing to inform you that I have placed Ilya Shapiro on administrative leave, pending an investigation into whether he violated our policies and expectations on professional conduct, non-discrimination, and anti-harassment, the results of which will inform our next steps. Pending the outcome of the investigation, he will remain on leave and not be on campus.”

One would be hard-pressed to find an institution whose principles and actions are more misaligned. Yet, Georgetown is far from unique in this regard. Almost all major universities make grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech. Few honor these commitments in the breach. Why?

Contrary to right-wing rhetoric, university presidents, deans, and administrators are not woke ideologues. The answer is not ideology. It is incentives.

University administrators get no reward for upholding abstract principles in the face of student outcry and protest. Their incentive is to quell the dissension as quickly as possible, which usually means mollifying the protestors. Standing on principle tends to exacerbate the strife by provoking more virulent student protests and generating negative media coverage. Those who successfully quiet the disruption receive praise from the university administration. (Indeed, this is precisely what happened at Georgetown when the dean fired and disciplined the adjunct professors for their speech last year. The President of the university published a campus-wide message praising his “decisive actions [as] essential and consistent with the ethos and ideals we strive to sustain at Georgetown.”) They receive no personal blowback for violating the institution’s abstract commitment to freedom of speech.

Consider the position of Georgetown’s dean. He is confronted with students using social media to ramp up outrage and skipping classes to protest. The Washington Post and other media outlets have picked up the story. There is a real risk of things spiraling out of control and disrupting the functioning of the law school. His strongest incentive is to make this issue go away. How can this be done? By mollifying the students or by sticking up for the University’s commitment to freedom of speech on campus?

How surprising can it be that, in the event, the dean spent more than an hour trying to assuage the students? Reiterating his shock—“[a]gain, I was appalled to see the tweet. I tried to move as quickly as I can . . . within hours of the tweet going out, I made my statement.”—sympathizing with the students—“this is painful for all of us but I know how painful and awful it is for you, and I know what a terrible burden it is,”—and praising them for their input—“I’m grateful for you taking the time to talk, I’m grateful for your insights, I heard a lot today that I won’t just be reflecting on but that I’ll be moving forward with, and I will be in dialogue with you about what we’re doing.”

What personal detriment does the dean suffer from violating the University’s speech and expression policy? His actions have been criticized as a violation of academic freedom in a public letter signed by more than a hundred academics. The officers of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education published a column in the Washington Post decrying his action as a violation of freedom of speech. These actions may make the authors and signers feel good about themselves, but they impose no hardship on the dean personally.

Universities that layer an abstract commitment to freedom of speech onto an incentive structure that rewards the suppression of offensive behavior are committing the classic managerial blunder of “hoping for A, but paying for B,” which invariably produces B. For the abstract commitment to freedom of speech to have any practical effect, universities must alter their incentive structures. Those with the responsibility of enforcing the commitment must either be rewarded for doing so or punished for failing to do so.

Fortunately, these incentives can be changed. The first requirement is to add the following sentence to the university’s speech and expression policy: The University will summarily dismiss any allegation that an individual or group has violated a university policy if the allegation is based solely on the individual’s or group’s expression of his, her, or its religious, philosophical, literary, artistic, political, or scientific viewpoints. This makes the university’s abstract commitment to freedom of speech definite and explicit. Think of this as a freedom of speech “safe harbor” provision.

University policy is binding on the institution. It creates a contract between the school and its students and faculty that is legally enforceable.

The second requirement is to create a pro bono legal group that will sue any school that violates the safe harbor provision. This allows parties targeted for their speech to sue for the violation of their contractual rights.

The prospect of such lawsuits does not change the incentives of university administrators. But it does change the incentives of one party; university counsel. University counsel are not interested in winning lawsuits brought against the university. They are interested in preventing lawsuits from being brought against the university in the first place. The combination of the safe harbor provision and the realistic threat of lawsuit for its violation can motivate university counsel to restrain the conduct of administrators. They might require allegations of harassment to be reviewed by a member of the counsel’s office who knows how to distinguish complaints about speech from genuine harassment. They will almost certainly insist on revising the university’s anti-harassment training to stress that students and faculty should not file complaints based solely on the content of the viewpoint being expressed. But whatever steps they take would tend to give the college’s or university’s abstract commitment to freedom of speech some real practical effect.

The fear of being sanctioned by universities for advocating unpopular ideas does not arise from a lack of institutional commitments to freedom of speech. Almost all universities make such commitments. The fear arises from the fact that no university administrator has the incentive to honor the commitment when it counts. Adding a safe harbor provision to university policy and organizing a pro bono legal firm dedicated to protecting freedom of speech on campus—something the Foundation for Individual Rights is currently doing—can change this incentive.

Administrators will not act against their own interests merely to uphold an abstract principle unless there is some cost for failing to do so. The threat of damage awards can be that cost. It is a way of making universities that issue grandiose commitments to freedom of speech put their money where their mouths are.

***********************************

My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

*******************************

No comments: