Friday, February 02, 2018




Grade School Uses Sex Columnist, Unicorn to Promote Gender Identity
   
Parents are furious after a California elementary school posted a bulletin board that addressed issues like sexual identity and encouraged children as young as four years old to break out of gender stereotypes.

The bulletin board at Rancho Romero Elementary School also featured nationally syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage as a role model for children. Mr. Savage also hosts an annual porn festival.

“For him to be a role model for four-year-olds to 11-year-olds is utterly disgusting,” one anonymous parent said on the Todd Starnes Radio Show. “He’s not someone you want to put up at an elementary school.”

The bulletin board included Mr. Savage’s photo (fully clothed) along with the following quote:

“A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It’s often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations who get bullied.”

In 2012, Mr. Savage bullied a group of Christian teenagers who walked out of a journalism conference after he launched a profane attack on the Bible. He called them “pansy-a—d.”

There was that time he tried to infect a Republican candidate with a flu virus. And how can we forget about the time he wished congressional Republicans would “f—ing die”?

“The man does nothing but spew vitriol at people he does not like — like religious groups and conservatives,” the parent said.

The parent, who has a first-grader and a fourth-grader at the public elementary school, said the gender bulletin board has created a firestorm. Of particular concern, the school used a unicorn as a propaganda tool.

The so-called “Gender Unicorn” introduced children to concepts like gender identity, gender expression and gender presentation. It also included words like “sexually attracted to” and “romantically/emotionally attracted to.”

“A unicorn — an object loved by little children — was used to lure them to the bulletin board,” the parent said on the Todd Starnes Radio Show. “It felt like it was a creepy way to lure a child over to the board and confuse them about gender.”

The San Ramon Valley Unified School District said the bulletin board is meant to highlight a monthly theme.

“For January the theme for the month is ‘breaking out of gender stereotypes,” a district spokesperson said.

“The school has a parent-led Inclusion and Diversity Committee that maintains a bulletin board to highlight a different theme each month within the rubric that all students, staff and parents are safe and welcomed on campus,” the spokesperson added.

The school did modify parts of the display after parents raised concerns about age-appropriate content. They said the initial content was only up for about four hours.

The school also acknowledged there was a quote and a photograph of Mr. Savage — the porn peddler.

“The quote and photo were removed as part of the revision,” the spokesperson said.

There are still two questions that have yet to be resolved.

First, why is the school district using a unicorn to confuse children about things they ought not to be confused about?

And secondly, what was school leadership smoking when it decided that a person like Dan Savage would be a good role model for four-year-olds?

SOURCE





Red States Drop the Ball on School Choice. Here’s Why That Needs to Change

Fixing our country’s system of education needs to be a priority, especially for those who have an opportunity to do something about it.

In a speech Monday proclaiming National School Choice Week, President Donald Trump said, “By giving parents more control over their children’s education, we are making strides toward a future of unprecedented educational attainment and freedom of choice.”

The school choice movement was launched when economist Milton Friedman proposed school vouchers in 1955. It has grown in scope and sophistication in the years that followed.

States around the country have enacted innovative programs, and the diversity of options beyond the traditional public school has certainly grown.

However, as impressive as these policy victories have been, reform has moved at far too slow a pace in places where political forces should be aligned to score wide-ranging victories.

It is understandable that school choice has met resistance from ideological opponents and teachers unions that desperately want to maintain the public school monopoly regardless of education results.

What’s disappointing is the lack of urgency to act in states that should be politically favorable to a change.

Though some Democrats certainly have come out in favor of school choice, Republicans generally have been more supportive, at least rhetorically.

This is why it is a disappointment that a huge number of deeply red states passed only minimal school choice programs in recent years, despite dominance at state and local levels of government.

Many of these red states have no programs at all.

Though Texas is known for its Republican leanings and is a frequent example of a good model for red states, it has failed so far on the issue of school choice. In fact, Texas doesn’t have a single private school choice option for parents.

As Lindsey Burke, The Heritage Foundation’s director for education policy, and Inez Stepman, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s education task force director (and also my wife), have noted, the Lone Star State has been dead in the water on education reform.

The two wrote in a paper for the Texas Public Policy Foundation:

The only state in the South without any kind of private school choice program, Texas recently received a disappointing 31st place (out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia) on the Report Card on American Education, published by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That relatively low ranking was driven primarily by the state’s continued failure to provide parents with any kind of meaningful private school choice options, which netted Texas an ‘F’ on choice.

According to ALEC’s report card, Texas isn’t the only red state dropping the ball.

Nebraska doesn’t have any private school choice programs, nor West Virginia and Wyoming. Utah, certainly one of the reddest states in the country, has only a limited voucher program. An attempt to expand vouchers in the state fizzled in 2007.

While a majority of states have had Republican-dominated legislatures and GOP governors in the past few years, only a few of these states have used the opportunity to revamp their education systems and bring meaningful school choice options, such as education savings accounts, to students and families.

Currently, only six states have programs allowing for education savings accounts. Only one of those programs, in Arizona, is universal. It’s a nice start, but not nearly enough to change the long-term problems in education.

School choice needs to be treated as more than something on the backburner. American students are not just falling behind in areas such as math and reading, they are increasingly losing touch with American civics and culture to an alarming degree.

It goes without saying that civic literacy is necessary in a republic, but our schools have done a poor job of transmitting these values to the younger generations.

The school choice movement has come a long way since 1955, and has clearly demonstrated that parental choice markedly improves education for young Americans across the board. It’s time to stop grumbling that our schools are leaving younger generations uninformed and make sure that parents will have access to the kinds of education opportunities that will allow us to finally turn things around.

SOURCE




Top reason Australians are quitting the workforce: High cost of childcare forces more than 100,000 parents to stay home

A direct result of government legislation requiring a big staff of overeducated people in each centre

Nearly 120,000 parents aren't working because child care is too expensive or they can't find a spot.

The high price of child care was the top reason cited for Australians who weren't in the labour force because they were looking after children, government data released on Thursday shows.

One in three, or 95,700, said this was the case for them, while another 21,700 said there was either no childcare service nearby or no spots available.

That's more than those who said they were stay-at-home parents because they preferred to look after their children that way - a reason given by 77,600.

The Federal Government hopes its new childcare subsidy system, which starts in July, will let many of these parents be able to take up work.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham estimates the overhaul will help an extra 230,000 families get back to work or take on more hours.

The Productivity Commission report shows the most parents saying stiff fees were a barrier to returning to work were in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

However, Queensland had the lowest median cost of daycare in the country - at $400 a week or $80 a day - and the NT was the third lowest.

Parents in Queensland also had the lowest out-of-pocket costs after government subsidies, across all income brackets.

The ACT had the highest fees, with a median weekly cost of $545 for long day care.

Under the new childcare support system, taxpayers will only pay subsidies for fees up to a maximum of $11.55 an hour ($115.50 a day or $577 for a full week).

In 2017, none of the median fees charged in any state was higher than this, however, the data does not reveal what the most expensive services cost and how many there are above this maximum level.

The middle level of fees in the ACT was $10.90 an hour.

SOURCE




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