I remember how it was -- JR
Connecticut school district facing backlash after stripping Veterans Day, Columbus Day from holiday calendar
A Connecticut school district is facing backlash after deciding to strip Veterans and Columbus Days from its official holiday calendar in a controversial vote by the school board last week.
Students at Stamford public schools will no longer get the day off on both holidays for the next two school years after the board voted 5-3 to remove them on Tuesday night, the Stamford Advocate reported.
Board member Joshua Esses made a motion to wipe the holidays from the school calendar at Tuesday’s meeting, arguing that the school year cut too far into the summer — ending in mid-June.
“We should make it shorter because it’s better educationally for our students,” Esses said of the school year — which is required by state law to have at least 180 teaching days for students, according to the local newspaper.
He also suggested cutting the religious holidays Eid al-Fitr and the second day of Rosh Hashanah from the list of official holidays with the same justification — but that motion received no support, the outlet reported.
Esses noted that Veterans Day and Columbus Day would instead be recognized and celebrated with lesson plans about the meaning of each on the day of, a state requirement.
Still, the board’s decision — which was discussed at another meeting earlier this month when brought up by a different member — garnered outrage from veterans and Italian-Americans.
Veteran Alfred Fusco, a founding member of the Stamford chapter of the Italian-American service organization UNICO, told ABC7 that the school district’s announcement was a double whammy.
“It was a gut punch. It was terrible. It had no inclination,” Fusco told the station.
The school district defended its decision when reached by The Post, noting that other districts in the state already keep schools open on the two holidays.
“Stamford Public Schools already hosts many events in recognition of our local veterans, and we look forward to continuing that tradition on Veterans’ Day in 2024 and 2025,” a spokesperson for Stamford Public Schools said in a statement.
“In addition, our Teaching and Learning Department will be working to develop programming about Columbus Day that will be presented to students in recognition of that federal holiday.”
A large part of the debate focused on the particular role of Columbus Day, which has been rejected by some Americans in recent years in favor of Indigenous People’s Day due to the sordid history surrounding Italian explorer Christopher Columbus’ treatment of native peoples.
The other board member Versha Munshi-South said she observed a class lesson titled “Columbus: Hero or Villian?” at Dolan Middle School which made her rethink the holiday.
“The students were using primary sources to investigate the true history of Columbus and I can tell you that based on primary source research, no, they did not conclude that Columbus was a hero,” Munshi-South said, according to the Advocate.
“I don’t think it makes sense to teach students one thing in class and then have Columbus Day off. It’s a mixed message for students,” she said.
Another member of the school board, however, said that she saw Columbus as a hero and thought polarization on the issue should not inform their decision.
“There’s a lot of polarization with curriculums, so to paint Columbus as a villain is because of the polarization and I think we can’t be doing that publicly,” Becky Hamman said, the outlet reported.
“On Tuesday, January 23, the Stamford BOE approved the 2024-25 and 2025-26 Stamford Public Schools calendars following passage of a motion to have schools remain open on Columbus Day and Veterans Day,” a spokesperson for Stamford Public Schools said in a statement.
“Several neighboring districts already keep schools open on Columbus Day and/or Veterans Day, and both Columbus Day and Veterans Day will be acknowledged on the Stamford Public Schools calendar with other holidays and religious observances that occur when school is in session.”
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Happy National School Choice Week
Since 2011, National School Choice Week has been celebrated in late January to raise public awareness for education choice and to “help families discover the traditional public, public charter, public magnet, private, online, and home education options available for their children.” So far, National School Choice Week has been extremely successful in advocating for more education choice, however, there remains much more work to be done.
Presently, approximately nine out of 10 K-12 students in the United States attend government-run public schools. This is not because most parents prefer that their children attend public schools. Rather, it is because the vast majority of American families cannot afford to subsidize public schools through their state and local taxes while simultaneously paying out-of-pocket for their children to attend non-government schools.
In fact, most parents strongly prefer that their children attend a school other than the one and only public option arbitrarily assigned to them based on their geographic location.
This is especially true for parents with children trapped in under-performing and dangerous public schools. In recent years, standardized test scores show public schools have done an absolutely awful job in properly educating their students for a successful future.
My home state of Illinois is a prime example of the decaying state of public education. In 2023, only 35 percent of Illinois public school students in grades three to eight met or exceeded proficiency levels for English language arts (ELA) and only 27 percent met or exceeded proficiency levels for math.
At the high school level, Illinois public school test scores are similarly dreadful. Only 31 percent of Illinois high schoolers met or exceeded the proficiency standard for ELA and 26 percent scored proficient in math.
On the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), “the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in various subject areas,” 31 percent of Illinois fourth graders scored proficient in ELA and an abysmal 21 percent tested proficient in math.
As academic achievement and test scores continue to head in the wrong direction in Illinois public schools, so, too, is “chronic absenteeism” and “chronic truancy.” In 2023, 28 percent of Illinois students missed at least 10 percent of school days with or without a valid excuse and 20 percent were “chronically truant.”
Student discipline has also emerged as a major problem. In 2023, the state recorded 250,351 “Discipline Action Incidents” committed by 114,218 students. This includes 15, 219 incidents involving violence with physical injury and 2,644 dangerous weapon incidents.
Despite these appalling statistics, which are the norm in far too many states, Illinois lawmakers terminated the state’s sole school choice option at the end of 2023: the highly popular and highly successful Invest in Kids Act.
While blue states like Illinois continue to wage all-out war on school choice, a different trend is emerging in red states. In 2023, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, and Utah passed universal school choice laws. In 2024, this trend is expected to continue.
Two of the most alluring aspects of school choice are that it results in less overall education spending and better academic outcomes.
On average, K-12 public schools spent $14,347 per pupil in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Several states, such as New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, and others spent more than $20,000 per student. On the other hand, the nation’s 22,440 private K-12 schools average tuition rate is $12,350 per student.
In Illinois, the state spends on average $20,152 per pupil in public schools whereas the average tuition for a private school registered at $8,464.
Generally, private schools are more affordable than public schools because they lack the massive bureaucracies that have become ordinary among public school districts. Private schools are more efficient and devote more of their resources straight into the classroom, whereas public schools and their bloated district offices divert precious resources to frivolous programs that have little to do with improving educational outcomes but lots to do with appeasing teacher unions and creating permanent bureaucratic positions.
What’s more, students attending private schools consistently outperform their public school peers on nationwide, standardized tests including the NAEP, better known as the “Nation’s Report Card.”
For most Americans, school choice is a commonsense policy that places parents, not education bureaucrats, in charge of their children’s education. This is the crux of the matter.
Eventually, I believe the tide will turn in favor of more school choice. Parents should possess the fundamental right to choose the educational option that best fits the unique needs of their children. Who knows, maybe a decade from now, school choice will be universal, making National School Choice Week more or less redundant. That would certainly be worth celebrating; but, until that day comes to fruition: Happy National School Choice Week, America.
https://townhall.com/columnists/christalgo/2024/01/25/happy-national-school-choice-week-n2634141
*****************************************The New York Times Is Wrong to Laud Schools Misleading Students About Climate Change
The New York Times (NYT) ran a story discussing a growing trend in states to incorporate climate change as a topic throughout their school district’s lesson plans. The story shows why this is a bad idea, showing how impressionable young minds are being indoctrinated into climate alarm, fed false narratives that are short on facts and lacking context.
The anecdotal example of incorporating climate change into young kids lesson plans opening the NYT’s story, “Reading, Writing, Math … and Climate Change?,” shows the perils of allowing misleadingly educated, inadequately informed teachers to teach kids about climate change, much less infusing climate change as a topic throughout a school systems’ lesson plans.
The NYT described the extensive training in climate science that the featured elementary school teacher in the story, Kristy Neumeister, received before unleashing her on her students:
Ms. Neumeister was one of 39 elementary school teachers from across the city who participated in a four-day training session in the summer called “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools.” Its goal was to make the teachers familiar with the topic, so they can work climate change into their lesson plans.
Four whole days to instill a climate science and policy education into teachers before sending them out educate (scare it turns out) the young kids in their classrooms with ill-informed, as the story demonstrates, lessons about the causes and consequences of climate change. The story quickly lays out the evidence for this assessment.
Third graders at Public School 103 in the north Bronx sat on a rug last month while their teacher, Kristy Neumeister, led a book discussion.
The book, “Rain School,” is about children who live in a rural region of Chad, a country in central Africa. Every year, their school must be rebuilt because storms wash it away.
“And what’s causing all these rains and storms and floods?” asked Ms. Neumeister.
“Carbon,” said Aiden, a serious-looking 8-year-old.
That is nonsense. Repeatedly building a school in well established flood plain is the cause of the school’s repeated flooding, not long-term climate change.
How can we know this? Chads geography and climate history tell the tale.
Northern Chad is largely desert with the remainder of the country consisting of various types of wooded savannah and steppes, except or one area, the Lake Chad flooded savanna—yes, it’s called a “flooded savannah,” because it typically floods annually.
Looking at data for Chad from the World Bank one finds that rainfall patterns in Chad have not changed significantly over the past 100 years, so there is no evidence climate change is causing floods to occur more frequently or to be more severe when they occur. In 2021, Chad’s rainfall total fell significantly from the previous year, but throughout the decade, Chad’s rainfall has stayed within its historic range, varying within the norm, higher one year, lower the next. Over the past two decades, claimed by climate alarmist to be the warmest on record, Chad’s rainfall totals have come nowhere near to exceeding its high rainfall total, of about 473 mm set in 1961, more than sixty years of global warming ago when the global average temperature was declining, which lead many scientists to warn of a return of the ice age. Nor have Chad’s recent rainfall totals come anywhere near its low mark of approximately 231 mm, set in 1984.
Indeed, Lake Chad, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Africa has declined in recent decades, but not due to decreased rainfall, since rainfall not decreased, but due to increased water withdrawals and diversions from the lake and its feeder rivers and streams to satisfy the demands of Chad’s growing population and agriculture. Chad’s population growth rate is 3.2 percent. Its population grew by 1.4 million people since 2021, alone. Of course when more people live in areas historically prone to nearly annual flooding, more people will be affected when floods occur.
In short, rainfall patterns haven’t changed in Chad and flooding has not become more frequent or severe. As a result climate change, contrary to what Neumeister is misleadingly teaching, can’t be responsible for the floods described at the school in Chad. This is clear example of a falsehood being used to promote fear of climate change in the New York School system’s lesson plans.
One suspects, neither Neumeister, nor the other teachers trained at the aforementioned “Integrating Climate Education in N.Y.C. Public Schools,” workshop were advised to check data and facts about the topics they would be discussing before incorporating alarming climate claims into their lesson plans. To the extent climate change has a place in schools’ curriculums, it is as part of science for students in higher grades, not infused across the broad spectrum of lessons taught to elementary school students.
Four days in a training is not enough time to build a core competency in anyone sufficient to teach kids or anyone else about climate change, but it is enough time to arm teachers, perhaps already predisposed to climate concern and activism, with propaganda to indoctrinate the impressionable youths they are charged with educating. If the Chad lesson was indicative of the types falsehoods Neumeister and others in New York schools and in other states where climate education has become (or is being proposed as) mandatory, are teaching daily to the kids in their classrooms, there is little wonder why the United States lags many countries of the world in science and math education, or that so many youths suffer climate related anxiety, as discussed at Climate Realism, here and here, and at Climate Change Weekly, for example.
For the children’s sake, get and keep climate change propaganda out of the classroom. Teachers should be helping kids learn how to think and reason through complex scientific and political issues, not what to think about them.
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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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