I remember how it was -- JR
Junior high teacher in Canada berates Muslim students for boycotting Pride events: 'If you don't think that should be the law, you can't be Canadian'
An audio clip, which has gone viral on social media, revealed a teacher at a junior high school in Canada chastising the Muslim students in her class for staying home from school rather than participating in scheduled Pride events. During the rant, the teacher became so heated that she even told Muslim students that they "can't be Canadian" if they do not support legalized gay marriage.
On the clip, a teacher at Londonderry Junior High School in Edmonton, Alberta, scolded students for skipping school "because you think there's some Pride activities going on" that day, and she gave several reasons that such behavior was not "acceptable."
First, she seemed to imply that Muslim students are obliged to support the LGBTQ agenda — which she even hinted was a kind of "religion" — because LGBTQ students have supported Islamic holidays in the past. "They're here when we did Ramadan," she reminded the class, "... And they're showing respect in the class for your religion, for your beliefs."
She then warned Muslim students that if they want "to be respected for who" they are, if they want to avoid racial or religious "prejudice," then they "better give" the same respect "back to people who are different" from them. The relationship "GOES TWO WAYS," she enunciated clearly.
"Back and forth. You want it, you gotta give it," she insisted.
During the two-minute clip, which was reportedly recorded and shared by a student, the teacher also discussed the differences between the laws and values in Canada and the laws and values in other countries. She asserted that all Canadians "believe in freedom" and "believe that people can marry whomever they want." Canada officially legalized so-called same-sex marriage in 2005.
She also seemed to presume that such laws grant Canada better moral standing in the world, and she drew a contrast between her home country and countries such as Uganda, which she incorrectly asserted will "literally ... execute" anyone suspected of being "gay." Under the new law, Ugandans caught engaging in sodomy can face up to life in prison, but the death penalty is restricted only to those who engage in "aggravated homosexuality" involving children, vulnerable adults, or those who are HIV-positive.
According to the teacher, anyone who supports such a law is not welcome in Canada. "If you believe that kind of thing, then you don't belong here," she said. "Because that is not what Canada believes."
"If you don't think that [gay marriage] should be the law, you can't be Canadian," she continued. "You don't belong here, and I really mean it."
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Award-Winning Gay Teacher Suspended for Speaking Out Against Transgenderism
A gay fifth grade teacher in Glendale, California, was placed on leave after complaining at a school board meeting that his school promotes transgenderism.
Ray Shelton, a 25-year veteran teacher, spoke at a recent meeting of the school board for the Glendale Unified School District wearing a T-shirt that read “Make Biology Great Again.”
Shelton, who teaches at Mark Keppel Elementary School, has been named the Glendale school district’s “Teacher of the Year” twice and earlier this year won the PTA’s Golden Oak Award.
In an exclusive interview, Shelton, who is gay, told The Daily Signal that his intent in speaking at the Glendale school board’s April 18 meeting was to speak what he called “basic, commonsense truths.”
Shelton told the board:
Two plus two equals four. The world is not flat. Boys have penises; girls have vaginas. Gender is binary and cannot be changed. Biology is not bigotry. Heterosexuality is not hate. Gender confusion and gender delusion are deep psychological disorders. No caring professional or loving parent would ever support the chemical poisoning or surgical mutilation of a child’s genitalia.
Transgender ideology is anti-gay, it is anti-woman, and it is anti-human. It wants to take away women’s sports, women’s rights, women’s achievements—it is misogyny writ large.
And I can also say this as a gay man, the gay people …
At this point, someone muted Shelton’s microphone and a board member informed the teacher that his time was up.
Applause broke out from the audience.
Glendale, a city located in the San Fernando Valley, is part of Los Angeles County. Its school system has 32 schools and 25,000 students, according to the district’s website.
A fellow teacher, Alicia Harris, filed a formal complaint against Shelton at 12:36 p.m. April 19, claiming that he was “showing off a swastika” during the school board meeting.
Shelton says during the board meeting he held up four “Progress Pride” flags arranged in a pattern to form a swastika. This, however, is a familiar meme on social media meant to criticize progressives by arguing that authoritarian measures to compel speech are fascist:
Shelton also alleges that Hagop Eulmessekian, Glendale’s director of student support services, assaulted him by ripping several “gay pride flags” out of his hand.
This incident is referenced in Harris’ complaint against Shelton to Kyle Bruich, the Glendale district’s human resources director, for holding up what she called a swastika at the April 18 school board meeting:
In a comment on social media praising a different speaker at the board meeting, teacher Taline Arsenian claimed that Shelton proved he is a Nazi by holding a banner mocking transgender activists as fascists:
The next day, April 19, Shelton was visited in his classroom at 8 a.m. by Principal Kristine Tonoli and a Glendale district administrator.
Shelton told The Daily Signal that he was given a letter informing him that he was being placed on paid leave pending investigation after “several complaints” were lodged against him.
But, the teacher said, all of the complaints provided to him by the Glendale district were made after he had been put on leave, not before, suggesting either that Glendale didn’t provide Shelton with earlier complaints or that Tonoli lied to Shelton. All of the emailed complaints provided to The Daily Signal originally were sent after the meeting at 8 a.m. April 19, according to time stamps.
After that classroom meeting April 19, Shelton was escorted to the edge of school property and told not to return unless accompanied by someone from the Human Resources Office.
When most public school districts place a teacher on leave, questions from students, parents, the community, and media typically are deflected with a response along these lines: “This teacher has been placed on leave pending an investigation; for the privacy of all parties, this is all we can say at this time.”
The Glendale district’s administration took a slightly different approach.
On April 20, Tonoli sent out an official email, via the district’s communication program Parent Square, accusing Shelton of “hate speech and hate symbols"
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The campaign against New York’s exam for specialized schools punishes the children of working-class immigrants in the name of racial equity
In late October 2012, as Hurricane Sandy was set to crash upon the shores of New York City, I remember standing in front of a newsstand in my neighborhood of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and scanning the headlines. A Chinese-language newspaper, the Sing Tao Daily, displayed a large photo of the white vortex on the front page. Below that was a banner: “SHSAT Postponed To November 18.”
What exactly is the SHSAT—something so important to Chinese-language New Yorkers that its postponement received top billing alongside one of the biggest natural disasters to ever strike the city? The Specialized High School Admissions Test (commonly abbreviated as the SHSAT) is the sole gatekeeper of admission into New York City’s specialized public high schools, some of the most prestigious public schools in the entire country. It is also a central battleground in a conflict over what kind of country America should be.
In working-class Sunset Park, where half the population is foreign-born and much of the other half is made up of the children of the foreign-born, tutoring centers are ubiquitous in the Asian-populated cross section. An array of acronyms fill the front windows of each tutoring center: SHSAT, PSAT, SAT, ACT, AP. While some immigrants may not have a full grasp of the English language, they can still understand that these acronyms serve as symbols of upward mobility—and of a meritocracy where access to elite spaces is not about knowing the right people and signaling the right cultural cues, but about competency on an exam that anyone can pass with enough studying. That’s what drew Jewish immigrants in droves to specialized high schools decades ago. And in an era where elite colleges consistently rank Asian applicants lower in “personality” metrics—a loophole that allows them to impose quotas and cap the number of incoming Asian students in the name of increasing “diversity”—it’s no wonder why many Asian immigrants are working to preserve standardized testing.
The children of Asian immigrants, like myself and the current and former students who spoke with me for this article, still tend to see the test as a good thing. For us, a colorblind, meritocratic admissions system is not only perfectly consistent with liberal ideals, but also serves as a crucial engine of economic mobility.
On the other side of the debate, the fight to eliminate the SHSAT is led by a cohort of identity rights activists, wealthy progressives, and other members of the professional-managerial class who depict the test as an oppressive tool of racial segregation. These people are represented by leading figures in the liberal educational establishment and by institutions like The New York Times, which published an article last week decrying the “lack of diversity” in city schools, while also noting that Asian students were offered 53% of all seats in the specialized high schools this year.
The Times article also describes the restoration of “tougher criteria” at specialized high schools as a move that is “worrying integration advocates.” In other words, the article and its supporters argue that people who support rigorous academic standards that are applied without regard for race or ethnicity are segregationists. And indeed, that is exactly how it was characterized by The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch, who responded to the revelation about a testing system in which Asians dramatically outperform whites and every other group by tweeting about “segregationist admission statistics,” which he labeled “an ongoing disgrace.”
A colorblind, meritocratic admissions system is not only perfectly consistent with liberal ideals, but also serves as a crucial engine of economic mobility.
The case for racial equity in New York’s schools was made most explicitly by former Department of Education Chancellor Richard Carranza who, in arguing against the SHSAT in 2018, remarked that “I just don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools.” His statement set off a wave of grassroots protests from Asian American parents, who knew exactly which “ethnic group” he was talking about.
Despite Carranza’s suggestion that a single homogenous group was unfairly monopolizing the top schools, the reality looks very different. During the four years I attended Stuyvesant, the most selective of all the specialized high schools, I witnessed a dazzling variety of ethnicities, cultures, and religions. Students wearing kippahs commingled with students clad in hijabs. Students from the West Indies socialized with students from India. Students from various East Asian backgrounds coagulated around similar interests: bubble tea, Korean pop music. No Stuyvesant student would ever claim that “one ethnic group” dominated the school.
The common thread that linked students of all stripes was the immigrant experience. During a social studies class one day, the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we had at least one grandparent born outside the U.S. Every single hand shot up. The teacher then dramatically shrunk the question’s scope to only apply to students with two foreign-born parents. Even then, only a few hands came down. Some students were immigrants themselves, coming with their family to America before high school and still managing to secure admission into the halls of upward mobility.
What is most notable about the schools, and yet goes largely ignored in the anti-SHSAT racial equity discourse, is that the immigrant dynamic operates separately from race. When The New York Times published a profile in 2012 of a Black student at Stuyvesant, titled “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High,” the student profiled was a Jamaican immigrant. The piece mentioned the former president of Stuyvesant’s Black Students Association, who is also Jamaican. The Times seemingly never gets tired of this subject, and ran another profile of Black Stuyvesant students seven years later. In that piece, every student profiled either had one non-Black parent or was from a Nigerian, Eritrean, or Kenyan immigrant family.
While New York’s top public schools are still full of the children of immigrant strivers, many among the city’s white liberal elites—America’s white saviors, as Zach Goldberg dubbed them—prefer sending their children to private schools that cost tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition.
These same private-school parents partake in cost-free virtue signaling by demanding that the SHSAT be eliminated to ensure more “diversity.” In fact, The New York Times seems to have made it a mission to guilt these parents into supporting the equity agenda. In 2020, the paper put out a podcast called Nice White Parents, then followed that up with a piece about “How White Progressives Undermine School Integration.” The podcast and article fail to consider the roles Asian American parents have played in the education debate. Indeed the only mention of Asians is a throwaway line where one panelist declares that both “white and Asian families” were complicit in opposing “integration,” and later mentions “white and privileged parents”—a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that casts Asians as oppressors of people of color, despite the fact that Asians are people of color.
But while the test-based system is presented as racist and backward, the evidence shows the opposite. Not only does it favor students from Asian backgrounds, it does so despite their relative lack of resources. Half the students at specialized high schools currently qualify for subsidized lunches. In contrast to media portrayals of “crazy rich Asians,” Asian Americans are the poorest racial group in New York City.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/last-holdouts-american-meritocracy
******************************************************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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