I remember how it was -- JR
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
‘Double Standard’: Appeals Court Rules in Favor of Christian Athletic Club Ousted From California School District
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a California school district violated the rights of a Christian athletics club by forcing it off campus.
In 2019, the San Jose Unified School District derecognized the Fellowship for Christian Athletics after a teacher made complaints that the club was sharing its faith on campus, which included the belief that marriage is between a man and a woman.
The FCA filed a lawsuit with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in April 2020 but faced several defeats in court, until the 9th Circuit ruled Wednesday that the district had potentially violated the FCA’s rights under the First Amendment and reversed a previous decision to deny FCA’s request for an injunction, according to court documents.
“The District, rather than treating FCA like comparable secular student groups whose membership was limited based on criteria including sex, race, ethnicity, and gender identity, penalized it based on its religious beliefs,” the ruling reads. “Because the Constitution prohibits such a double standard—even in the absence of any motive to do so—we reverse the district court’s denial of FCA’s motion for a preliminary injunction.”
The FCA requires students who volunteer with the club in a “leadership capacity” to sign a statement of faith that includes the belief that “sexual intimacy is designed only to be expressed within the confines of a marriage between one man and one woman” and that they will follow the club’s policy on this issue, according to the ruling.
In April 2019, Peter Glasser, a teacher at Pioneer High School, obtained a copy of this statement of faith and posted it on his whiteboard, saying that he was “deeply saddened” by such a policy.
The following month, after several complaints from Glasser, the district stripped FCA of its Associated Student Body status and could not longer be a recognized club on campus, according to the ruling. Principal Herb Espiritu said the policy is of a “discriminatory nature” in the Pioneer’s school newspaper, The Pony Express, despite later testifying that he did not consult FCA about the policy before making the decision.
A district court ruled against the Christian organization’s request for an injunction in June 2022, meaning the group could not operate on campus as an Associated Student Body while the lawsuit went through the court system, according to the ruling. The appeals court, however, determined that the lower court’s decision was flawed since it was trying to hold the FCA to a higher standard than it had for the past two decades, according to the ruling.
“Here, the District’s new policy of enforcing its nondiscrimination rules likewise alters the status quo of providing FCA clubs ASB recognition,” the ruling reads. “Because it was the District’s action that ‘affirmatively changed’ that status quo and Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction seeks to restore that status quo … the district court thus erred in applying a heightened standard applicable to mandatory injunctions.”
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Australia: Universities deliver ‘woke’ degrees to trainee teachers who demand more practical training
“Woke’’ universities are instructing trainee teachers in gender theory, climate activism and race relations, as young teachers demand practical classroom skills.
One in five teachers has warned the federal Education Department that universities failed to teach them all the practical skills required to teach children to read and write, or to manage classrooms.
Up to one-third of recent teaching graduates from some universities declared their degree had failed to prepare them for the classroom.
Teachers-in-training have been lectured on “postmodernism, existentialism and reconstructionism” in the University of Canberra’s initial teacher education degree.
Course materials sent to students show lecturers have critiqued the “social and political content’’ of the Australian Curriculum, mandated by the nation’s education ministers for teaching children from primary school through to year 10.
A lecture slide notes “we aren’t even doing a very good job”, tallying up 19 references to social justice, Aboriginal rights, invasion, colonisation, the Stolen Generation, assimilation, social justice and racism.
The course material includes a slide from CNN, with the title “Our World Today’’, linking climate change to aggression and violent behaviour, depression and anxiety, farmer suicide and forced migration.
Thousands of students skipped school on Friday to march in “School Strikes 4 Climate’’ protests in Brisbane, Darwin and Melbourne.
One protester brandished a misspelt placard declaring “I’M MAD AND DISSAPOINTED”.
Two of Australia’s most eminent scientists – Nobel laureate and Australian National University vice-chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt and former chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel – this week criticised the poor levels of literacy and numeracy among school students and called for greater focus on schools teaching the basics of English and mathematics.
One-third of school students failed to meet the minimum standards for reading, writing and numeracy in this year’s NAPLAN (National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy) tests, with students twice as likely to fail than to excel in the tests.
But many teachers are struggling with literacy and numeracy themselves, as universities fill their teaching degrees with lectures on social justice.
The federal Education Department revealed on Tuesday that many teachers fresh from university feel their degrees failed to prepare them for classroom teaching.
“A lot of students talked about the need to have more practical on-the-job training as part of the course and some suggested something along the lines of an apprenticeship model,’’ said Lisa Bolton, director of research and strategy for the department’s Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching survey of university graduates.
“They wanted to know more about classroom behaviour management, dealing with parents and dealing with students with particular learning needs.
“They said the placement was too short, the course was too theoretical and even a bit outdated. A few had made comments about wanting the lecturers to have more recent teaching experience in schools.’’
One University of Canberra final-year student told The Australian the education degree was “teaching us to indoctrinate students’’. “It teaches about gender diversity and critical race theory rather than drilling down on the fundamental skills so we can be really effective teachers ourselves,’’ the student said.
“I’m pretty irritated by all the politically correct and woke stuff. “We could learn more in a school classroom than in the university … and save ourselves and the taxpayer a lot of money.’’
At the University of Canberra, a lecturer’s slide about “postmodernist writing’’ includes a rambling and incomprehensible 92-word sentence: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’’
A University of Canberra spokeswoman said the student’s complaints “do not accurately represent’’ the quality and content of its degree. She said trainee teachers were given practicum placements in schools, ranging from a week in the first year to 30 days in the fourth year of study.
“Taken together, all units of study that focus on a key learning area of the Australian Curriculum – mathematics, English, science etc – represent approximately 50 per cent of the total units studied by students in an undergraduate course of initial teacher education,’’ the spokeswoman said.
“The other half of the courses focuses on educational and developmental psychology, classroom and behaviour management, the use of data to improve learning, designing learning for diversity and inclusion, and the development of a professional identity well-informed by policy, theory, appropriate sources of professional learning and codes of conduct and practice.’’
Federal, state and territory education ministers have given universities until the start of 2025 to update their degrees to focus more on classroom management, children’s brain development and the teaching of phonics-based reading and writing, as well as mathematics.
The detail of what is taught in existing university degrees is kept secret: universities must submit course content to state and territory teaching accreditation bodies for approval, but most only publish a broad outline on their websites.
The Australian sought the universities’ course materials from the Queensland College of Teachers but was told they could not be released “for privacy reasons’’.
The University of Queensland’s website shows that teaching students spend the first six weeks of their degree learning about “sociological ideas and concepts needed for understanding the complexities of schooling and the social processes that often go on within them”. “We delve into the history of knowledge production in sociology, and explore the need to decolonise, expand and diversify what we know about schools and the processes that go on in them,’’ it states.
Students are assessed, in part, on a 10-minute verbal presentation explaining concepts such as “decolonising knowledge’’, the “myth of meritocracy” and “deficit discourses’’. Another lecture is about “expanding notions of sex, gender and sexuality’’.
At Victoria University, the very first subject in its teaching degree aims to “develop understanding for the cultures, histories and languages of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and to use this knowledge in the promotion of reconciliation”.
The teaching of science, maths and reading is not covered until the second year, and students must wait until the final year of their four-year degree to specialise in subjects such as biology and humanities, or to integrate the use of digital technologies in lessons.
Charles Sturt University’s course handbook for its Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood and Primary) has a list of 11 outcomes for its graduates.
The top priority is for graduates to be “agents of change’’’.
“Graduates from this course will teach for social justice and equity,’’ it states. The fifth priority is that “graduates from this course will teach for student learning’’.
At the University of Adelaide, an introduction to Australian history “treats the development of Australian society to the present through the lenses of Aboriginal deep time history; convicts and colonialism; war and conflict; migration and multiculturalism; landscape and the environment, and; the development of democratic institutions”.
Despite 13 years at school and four at university, 7 per cent of the 20,000 final-year trainee teachers failed to pass the mandatory literacy and numeracy test in 2021.
The Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students was set up as a guardrail to keep poorly trained teachers out of classrooms.
The test includes questions that could be answered by primary school students, such as correcting a spelling error or answering: “This year a teacher spent $383.30 on stationery. Last year the teacher spent $257.85 on stationery. How much more did the teacher spend this year than last year?’’
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The DEI Racket Transformed Our Colleges, Universities. But Tide Could Be Turning
College campuses have been dominated by the Left for generations. That’s hardly news to anyone. But a recent news report sheds light on how higher education has been transformed from a general haven of left-wing ideology into an engine of radicalism and revolution in the name of DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The lengthy report in The New York Times, of all places, highlights how the use of DEI statements essentially has allowed schools to create ideological loyalty oaths for new faculty. These tests aren’t being applied only in humanities departments, they’re the norm in science departments and all others too.
California—upholding its reputation for being at the cutting edge of anti-civilizational lunacy and tyranny—has predictably gone all in on the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime. Fealty to DEI dogma has become practically mandatory at all levels of higher education.
The Times notes that the faculty senate at the University of California, San Francisco urged professors to apply an “anti-oppression and anti-racism” lens to their coursework. On its website, UCLA’s public affairs school pledged to “decolonize the curriculum and pedagogy.” And the faculty senate of California Community Colleges instructed teachers on their duty to “lift the veil of white supremacy” and “colonialism.”
“Professions of fealty to DEI ideology are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless,” Daniel Sargent, a professor of history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “We are institutionalizing a performative dishonesty.”
It’s not just that school administrators enforce a pervasive, left-wing culture on campus. That’s been happening for generations. These schools also are hiring with strict DEI-style parameters, to the near total exclusion of merit.
In one study, according to the Times, researchers found that at Berkeley “a faculty committee rejected 75% of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements.”
It seems this may have been a racial test too. From the Times’ report:
Latino candidates constituted 13% of applicants and 59% of finalists. Asian and Asian-American applicants constituted 26% of applicants and 19% of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14% made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3% of applicants and 9% of finalists.
That makes sense, given what’s in the diversity statements. Many schools, including Berkeley, publicly post their standards online. Among the answers that will produce a low score is saying that you will “treat everyone the same.”
To get the highest scores, you need to be explicitly racial in thinking and demonstrate that you’ve not only participated in or will participate in campus DEI programs but will be actively leading new initiatives.
What’s clear is that these schools aren’t focused simply on weeding out conservatives. People anywhere vaguely on the Right clearly don’t have a ghost of a chance of getting through the application process. No, these schools are about finding active, devoted leaders of social justice causes.
If you aren’t a DEI revolutionary, schools don’t want you to teach about science or engineering or anything else at their institution.
Remember, when the Left says “believe the science,” what it’s really saying is “believe the left-wing activist with institutional backing next to his/her/zir name.”
Unfortunately, what started in California didn’t stay in California, as many schools around the country copied the Golden State model.
Among the methods schools use to promote DEI goals is what John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, called “cluster hiring.” Universities hire applicants in bulk, using DEI statements to weed out most unwanted applicants.
Sailer noted how in 2021, Vanderbilt University’s Department of Psychology undertook a cluster hire that “eliminated approximately 85% of its candidates based solely on diversity statements.”
The federal government exacerbates this problem.
“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has allocated $241 million in grant money for cluster hires at universities around the country—with the condition that every search committee must require and heavily weigh diversity statements,” Sailer wrote.
The DEI racket is a national phenomenon, but this bleak environment includes signs that change may be coming.
It seems that some school systems are reconsidering their DEI litmus tests. For instance, Georgia’s public university system eliminated DEI requirements in July. It put out a statement saying that hiring decisions should be “free of ideological tests, affirmations, and oaths.”
I’d like to ascribe this change to a genuine change of heart, but it’s telling that this policy shift came right after the Supreme Court’s ruling that racial preferences in college admissions are unlawful.
It goes to show how much of a game-changer that decision is. Schools now have reason to be concerned about lawsuits from applicants claiming discrimination.
Creating ideological litmus tests that appear to discriminate and actually tell faculty that not discriminating is bad surely won’t help the cause of colleges and universities.
This small retreat won’t exactly fix what ails higher education in America, but it does represent an opening for a recalibration.
Larger change will happen when more schools return to a classical learning model and jettison the DEI regime altogether. That seems unlikely to happen without outside pressure.
But outside pressure is building as institutional trust declines. If more states reject the California model, a genuine new birth of freedom in education may not be so far-fetched as it seemed just a few years ago.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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