I remember how it was -- JR
Kids Finally Returned to School After a Lengthy Teachers Strike. Here’s How the Teachers Union Reacted
Students in Newton, Massachusetts returned to the classroom this week following a teachers strike that lasted more than two weeks, according to several reports.
The walkout began on Jan. 19, impacting 2,000 instructors and about 12,000 students, according to The Washington Post. It was the sixth teachers strike in the state since 2022 and the longest, though strikes are illegal in the state.
Reportedly, the strike occurred over wages for employees. The Newton Teachers Association bargained with Newton Public Schools for 10 months before the previous contract expired on August 31, 2023. On Sunday, a new contract was solidified (via WBUR):
Ratified by NTA members Sunday, it includes a 30% raise in starting salary for teacher aides — from $28,270 to $36,778 — and a district promise to hire at least five more social workers at the elementary schools. The union and the district also agreed to double the number of district-paid parental leave days from 10 days to 20 days and allow total paid parental leave of 60 days, up from 40 days. They also negotiated a 12% increase to annual cost of living adjustments for all educators over the next four years.
The new terms will cost the Newton Public Schools an additional $53 million compared with the last contract. A return to work agreement, meantime, specifies that no educators will face disciplinary action for the work stoppage.
In a statement, a teachers union bargainer, Ryan Normandin, said that the teachers taught their students to “stand up for themselves.”
“We taught our students not to be afraid that when those in power try to take away your rights, that they should stand up for themselves, that they should not do it alone, but together,” Normandin said. “We taught every other district in this state what will happen if they try to balance their budgets on the backs of our students and educators.”
Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, reacted to the statement on X.
“You robbed your innocent students of the ability to receive an education,” she wrote.
In recent years, has Townhall covered how many teachers unions across the country went on strike ahead of the 2022-2023 school year. This is the same time most school districts planned to return to full-time, in-person and "normal" schooling since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in record breaking learning loss.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2024/02/07/newton-teachers-strike-statement-n2634830
*********************************************At Columbia Law School, only one student club was rejected this year — the one formed to oppose antisemitism
LONG BEFORE antisemitism erupted on college campuses last fall, Marie-Alice Legrand knew what hostility to Jews could lead to.
As a young girl growing up in Hamburg, Germany, Legrand could look from her bedroom window onto the bare expanse of the Bornplatz, the site of what was once the city's largest synagogue. The great Jewish house of worship was torched on Kristallnacht by antisemitic mobs; a few months later the Nazis ordered the Jewish community to demolish what remained of the building and turn over the land to the city. The deportation of Hamburg's Jews to the death camps began in 1941. In the summer of 1942, the Jewish family that owned what would later become Legrand's childhood home was murdered in Auschwitz.
Like all schoolchildren in modern Germany, Legrand was taught from an early age about the Holocaust. "I always thought about what those individuals must have gone through," she told me in a phone conversation Monday. "When we learned about the hatred of the Jews, about the mass murder, I tried hard to relate to the people who were involved."
A Black German of French Caribbean descent, Legrand went to Paris to study history and management, then moved to New York to earn a law degree at Columbia University. She said she hadn't expected to become an activist in her final year, but everything changed after Israel was savagely attacked on Oct. 7.
Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in "blatant antisemitism and hate," as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words "By Any Means Necessary." A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called "astounding," "awesome," and "victories of the resistance." More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate "military action" against the Jewish state.
The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but "there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends." She reached out on social media. "You are not alone," she posted. "I unequivocally support and stand with you."
She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.
Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.
On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group's other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.
But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.
Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand's group be rejected on the grounds that it would "silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic." It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia's campus.
Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
In the end, the absurdity of the attack made no difference. For an hour, Legrand and her colleagues were grilled by the student senate. Then, by an anonymous vote, Law Students Against Antisemitism was rejected.
Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was "heartbroken" by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn't forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.
https://jeffjacoby.com/27539/at-columbia-law-school-only-one-student-club-was
*********************************************Classroom chaos linked to Aussie teaching styles
Teachers should instruct rowdy students in good behaviour and use back-to-basic teaching methods, a senate inquiry into chaotic classrooms will recommend on Wednesday.
Schools need closer ties with health services to give students faster access to psychologists, social workers and behaviour specialists, the Senate Standing Committee on Education has concluded after a 15-month inquiry into the issue of increasing disruption in classrooms.
The committee will recommend that the Senate begin a follow-up inquiry, to investigate Australia’s declining academic standards, focusing on literacy and numeracy.
Its final report contains fresh data from student surveys in the latest global testing of 15-year-old students in maths and science, the 2021 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
A startling 83 per cent of students responded that “students do not listen to what the teacher said’’ in mathematics lessons.
Ten per cent said students failed to listen in “every lesson’’, one in four said classmates did not listen to the teacher “most lessons’’, and half said students failed to listen during “some lessons’’.
In contrast, just 1 per cent of students in Japan – one of the highest-performing countries – said students failed to listen in every lesson. Only one in 20 Japanese students said classmates ignored the teacher in most lessons, and one-third said students failed to listen in some lessons.
An analysis prepared for the senate committee found that the “disciplinary climate’’ in Australian schools was the fifth-lowest among 37 nations in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).
The senate inquiry, chaired by Liberal Party Senator Matt O’Sullivan, will recommend the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) devise a “behaviour curriculum’’ to teach students how to behave in class.
It calls on teachers to use evidence-based teaching methods, including “explicit instruction’’ with step-by-step explanations, and practice and testing to ensure all children mastered each lesson.
The committee has called for an end to open-plan classrooms, which can be noisy and distracting for teachers and students.
Teachers told the inquiry that out-of-control students had sexually assaulted and threatened to kill them, punched classmates, and dealt drugs in the playground.
The National Catholic Education Commission said principals were the victims of physical violence at 11 times the rate of average Australians. The Australian Psychological Society said disruptive behaviour could be linked to low levels of literacy.
Children and Media Australia said violent videos and games were a risk factor for aggression among children and teenager.
Vaping was singled out by the NSW Primary Principals’ Association.
The Australian Secondary Principals’ Association said many teachers were at “breaking point and the addition of disruptive youth adds to this load’’.
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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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