I remember how it was -- JR
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
No One Should Be Surprised By The Depraved Radicalism On College Campuses
Students and administrators at top universities — along with Black Lives Matter, the Democratic Socialists of America, and practically the entire radical left industrial complex — have shocked Americans by supporting terrorists who massacred more than 1,200 Jews last weekend. No one should be surprised, however.
As we have long pointed out, DEI, CRT, BLM, ESG, etc. — the radical left’s unsavory alphabet soup — are Marxist groups or concepts dedicated to societal destruction, not reform.
Their leaders were clear about this. They said it. Elite institutions handed the keys to society to them for many reasons — fear, white guilt for crimes they never committed, a period of collective hysteria following George Floyd, careerism, etc. But they can’t now claim to have been misled.
“Critical Race Theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it,” said Derrick Bell, the godfather of Critical Race Theory. Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter, was clear that her goal was “dismantling the organizing principle of this society.”
Most of the student groups’ statements have quoted the 1960 revolutionary Frantz Fanon, by name or by words. Fanon described “decolonization” as “quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”
Larry Summers, former cabinet secretary, may now say he’s never felt more alienated from Harvard, the university he once led as president because 31 student organizations issued a statement condemning Israel — not the terrorists — for the slaughter. But what did people think the radicals meant?
As Students for Justice in Palestine at UVA succinctly put it on Instagram, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” Or, as Joseph Stalin is often quoted, “you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.”
Except now it is finally dawning on many Americans that they sent their own children to campuses to be indoctrinated into the amoral acceptance of the rape of Jewish women, the beheading of babies, the savaging of grandmothers, the slaughter of entire families, the abduction of children.
They accept this depravity because they have been told by school administrators that Israel, like the U.S., is a “settler state,” a place that was colonized. Like the U.S., the descendants of the settlers must now give the country back to the original inhabitants. Practically every campus today has a sign that indicates from which tribe the land was originally “stolen.”
Never mind that Jews preceded Arabs and have continuously lived in the land they are alleged to have colonized. And never mind that those tribes from which campus land was allegedly stolen themselves took that land from another people who preceded them.
Instead, the radical left is pushing their narrative about colonization, justifying unlimited moral crimes with indifference to historical facts. Derron Borders, director of DEI at Cornell, wrote on Instagram that, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”
The day Hamas began its orgiastic killing spree, Borders wrote “F–k your fake outrage at Palestine when you’ve literally been silent about the violence perpetuated by Israel against Palestine every day.”
Cornell parents were so outraged that Cornell now says that Borders is on “administrative leave.”But again, what did they think BLM, DEI, CRT, etc. meant?
Elite institutions began handing the keys to the likes of Derron Borders a long time ago. When universities began hiring unrepentant terrorists and Marxist revolutionaries, like Bill Ayers and Angela Davis, as their professors they had to know where this would all lead.
They produce students who excel at storming Jewish student events with chants about freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” by which they mean a genocide of the Jews.
But those students tend to lack other socially useful skills and behaviors that would make them employable. Only universities seem eager to welcome campus radicals by hiring them as DEI staff or admitting them to graduate programs where they can be trained as the next generation of faculty fomenting more campus radicalism.
This long march through our institutions has culminated in universities that are unwilling or unable to adhere to norms of decent morality, let alone rigorous scholarship.
All of this took decades to develop and was perfectly foreseeable as it unfolded. Now, even if these radical ideologies begin to recede as a result of their excesses, fixing universities will take years, if not decades.
We can begin by defunding the ones who refuse to police the behavior of their faculty, staff, and students when they engage in unscholarly and monstrous behavior. Academic freedom does not require that we donate or appropriate public funds to the arsonists setting decent society on fire.
Firing Derron Borders and eliminating the DEI bureaucracy he heads would be a good start.
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The Lesson Is Clear: Regulation Makes Charter Schools Less Innovative
When the Blues Brothers posed as the band in a rural bar, Elwood asked what kind of music they usually had. The bartender cheerfully replied, “We got both kinds. We got country and western!” If you are seeking a charter school in a state that heavily regulates them, you can expect a similar kind of answer. They have both kinds of charter schools, “no excuses” and college-prep.
Of course, many parents want charter schools with strict “no excuses”–style discipline that focus narrowly on preparing students to excel on math and reading achievement tests, but not all of them do. One of the great advantages of school choice is that it allows families to find the right kinds of schools for their own children.
Quite often, different kids need different kinds of schools. If states regulate charter schools too heavily, they stifle the variety of approaches that school choice could offer and prevent too many kids from finding the right kind of school for them. We know heavy charter regulation has this negative effect on diversity and innovation in the charter sector because we actually measured it in our new peer-reviewed study.
To gauge regulation, we looked at how the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) assessed the policies governing charter schools in each state. States with higher scores from NACSA are those that more heavily regulate who can open a charter school and how charter performance is evaluated, and force charter schools to close for failing to meet those performance goals, even if parents want them to remain open.
To measure how innovative charter schools are in each state, we examined the websites of 1,261 charter schools that opened at the same time that NACSA issued its ratings, to see how they varied along five dimensions: the type of curriculum they used; the pedagogical approaches used to teach that academic content; the types of students they sought to serve; whether they delivered that education in person, virtually, or with a mixed approach; and whether they had a specialized theme, such as technology, art, or the environment.
Some of the states with the most innovative charter-school sectors included Colorado, North Carolina, and Utah. Colorado has charters focused on math and reading achievement, like KIPP Academy, but they also offer classical-education options, like Liberty Common School, as well as schools using Montessori techniques, such as St. Vrain Community Montessori School.
But Colorado, as well as North Carolina, Utah, and other states with innovative charter-school sectors, receive low marks from NACSA for regulating their charter schools more lightly than NACSA prefers. By contrast, states with high NACSA scores, such as Nevada, Indiana, and Ohio, have a remarkable lack of variety within their charter-school options.
The pattern is unmistakable. More heavily regulated charter-school sectors are generally less innovative and diverse.
Let’s put the choice back in school choice. Severely limiting education options through onerous regulation defeats the purpose of true education freedom. Parents care about a lot more than standardized-test scores. They want a school that is safe, aligns with their values, develops character, and cares about their children.
Some states have figured this out better than others. If policy-makers and charter-school authorizers don’t start ignoring national “experts” such as NACSA and offer families the variety of school options they want, those families might avoid charter schools altogether. States with the most innovative charter schools enroll a higher percentage of students and have been growing that enrollment faster than states with the least innovative charters.
Parents want options, and charter-school regulatory environments must ensure that those options are available.
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Australia: Queensland teachers quitting in droves
Will the government ever walk back the wishy-washy discipline policies that are driving them away?
The number of new teachers and teacher aides starting at Queensland schools is barely bridging the gap left by the thousands who are deserting classrooms, despite Education Queensland's celebration of “exceeding” recruitment targets.
In 2½ years, the state school system has hired more than 6600 new teachers and teacher aides. But in the past 18 months, more than 5700 have left the workforce.
There are about 55,000 teachers and almost 19,000 teacher aides employed across the state, which means it lost 7.2 per cent of its teacher workforce in 18 months, and 9.2 per cent of its overall teacher aide numbers.
The Courier-Mail obtained a region-by-region breakdown from the Education Department that showed South East Queensland was topping the teacher and teacher aide losses.
Further afield, Central Queensland and the Darling Downs also recorded comparatively high turnover, while the Sunshine Coast and Mackay-Whitsunday regions were comparatively low.
The new data comes after an alarming two-year surge in the rate of overall Education Department staff packing in their jobs, reaching a five-year peak of 6.61 per cent.
The department’s 2023 annual report said the state government was on track to meet its 2020 election promise to recruit more than 6100 new teachers and more than 1100 new teacher aides in 2021-24.
About 1000 unqualified university students will have taught in Queensland classrooms by the end of this year, recruited before graduating to help desperate principals unable to fill vacancies with qualified staff.
Ms Grace said Queensland was below the 9.5 per cent national education staff turnover rate, and teaching vacancies in the state remained steady at about 2 per cent.
“With a workforce of around 97,000 people, there will always be people leaving and joining, but I am proud of our 95 per cent retention rate among our teachers – one of the highest in Australia and higher than the workforce more generally,” she said.
“There’s nearly 6000 more teachers and 1500 more teacher aides since we came to government in 2015.
“And even as enrolments have fallen through the last few atypical years, our teacher numbers have gone up, meaning our ratios continue to improve.
“But we will never rest on our laurels – we want more of the brightest and best coming to work in our classrooms and staying there.
“That’s why our excellent EBAs, nation-leading programs like Turn to Teaching and Trade to Teach, our new supported pathway for teacher aides, and support for our staff including our new Education Futures Institute, are so important.”
Opposition education spokesman Dr Christian Rowan said Queensland students were falling short of key targets and the state government was failing to deliver teachers to turn this around.
“The government promised 6190 additional teachers and 1139 teacher aides at the last election, but three years on, they’ve delivered less than 10 per cent of what they promised,” he said.
“The latest Queensland Workforce Profile figures from March 2023 revealed there has been an increase of only 578 teachers since September 2020.”
Queensland Teachers’ Union president Cresta Richardson said addressing the current teacher shortage would take time, but the union would continue to work with all levels of government.
“Attraction and retention of teachers to the profession hinges on providing adequate resourcing to state schools along with a focus on the reduction of teacher and school leader workload and student engagement,” she said.
“Quality internships also play an important role and the QTU calls on the state government to expand the Turn to Teach and Trade to Teach programs and to consider a range of other multifaceted solutions.”
The $19.8m Turn to Teaching program – providing aspiring teachers with financial support, paid internships, and a guaranteed permanent role in a state school – had 39 interns in schools in 2023, and a second cohort of 99 due to do their internships next year.
The $9.88m Trade to Teach program – aiming to boost technology teachers by turning tradies into teachers – has 38 registered participants at the University of Southern Queensland or Central Queensland University due to start their internships next year.
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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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