Monday, May 13, 2019






'F**king Terrible Person!' Angry Student Who Punched Pro-Life Protester Charged With Assault

On Tuesday, the pro-life organization Created Equal posted a video showing a young female college student physically assaulting a pro-life protester. Police confirmed that the student who punched the pro-life protester in the face will indeed be charged with assault.

On April 2, a pro-life protester with Created Equal set up a poster depicting the gruesome reality of abortion — an unborn baby violently killed — at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. While these posters are controversial among the pro-life movement, displaying them does not justify violent attacks against the protesters.

"Did y'all put these up?" a woman asks in the video. As soon as the man confirms that he did, she rushes in, punching him in the face multiple times and hitting him in the stomach. She concludes by yelling, "F**king terrible person!"

"You’re a terrible person. You — this is not okay! This is not okay! This is not okay! Shut the f**k up right now!" she kept yelling. "This is wrong! This is triggering! You’re not an innocent human being. You’re a terrible person."

The protesters called the cops and told her to stay on site. The police confirmed she will be charged with misdemeanor assault.

Created Equal has documented incidents of violence against members of the team: a liberal student stole and vandalized pro-life signs in Indiana last October; a masked man attacked a pro-life sign with a club in Ohio in September 2016; an angry man assaulted a pro-life activist at an Ohio high school in May 2016; and an angry woman yelled at a young boy and kicked a pro-life sign in Columbus in July 2014.

Most of these cases involved graphic pro-life posters showing aborted babies. These posters do display the truth about abortion, but many pro-life activists oppose displaying them in this way because it incites anger and many say these posters are unlikely to convince people. Created Equal argues that these posters do convince people, and they have videos that seem to support that contention.

"The police did charge the student with non-aggravated assault," Mark Harrington, president of Created Equal, confirmed to PJ Media on Tuesday. "The video was never released until now. We have a call into the prosecutor to see if there is any action on the case."

He also promised that Created Equal will release another video on Thursday, "showing another UNC student getting arrested for stealing our signs."

SOURCE 






Taxpayers on hook for student loans

Student loans, already a hardship for many young borrowers, now are projected to be a burden for another class of people: U.S. taxpayers.

The federal student loan program will cost the federal government $31 billion over the next decade, according to recent estimatesfrom the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s a shift from past CBO forecasts that the government would profit from the program.

“The notion that the student loan portfolio generates huge profits for the federal government is false,” said Kenneth Megan, a senior policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “If anything, they’re small and declining.”

Politicians on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and President Donald Trump, have criticized the prospect that the government would make money from student loans.

Income-Driven Repayments

The latest data shows how the Education Department’s student loan program has slowly grown more expensive for taxpayers. While some of the increase can be attributed to interest rates, the bulk of the change has come from the cost of the almost $1.5 trillion in federal loans students already have outstanding.

More loans are in default, and less is being collected on outstanding loans, according to the the department’s budget request. In addition, more borrowers than anticipated are enrolling in income-driven repayment plans. These allow borrowers to pay a percentage of their income for a set number of years, after which the remainder of the loan is forgiven.

About 30 percent of borrowers with direct federal loans, the most common type, were in income-driven repayment programs in fiscal 2018, a 29 percent increase from two years before, according to the Education Department.

The additional cost isn’t coming from new loans but current ones, said Gordon Gray, director of fiscal policy with the conservative American Action Forum.

“It’s not like since the last baseline they said ‘Oh my goodness, loans being made now are getting worse,’” Gray said. “Rather, loans that were previously made have gotten more expensive than we thought they would be.”

SOURCE 






It’s time for Australia to introduce a national school starting age

If you’re a parent of a preschool-aged child one of the first things you’ll do when you start thinking about their schooling is start hunting for information about the best age for them to start.

Good luck.

Thanks to the wild variation in minimum school starting ages from state to state, you’re likely to come away even more bemused by the complexity of the issue than before you flipped open your laptop.

The six Australian states and two territories each have different minimum ages that a child can begin their schooling (and thanks to our decentralised education system you’ll struggle to find even that information on a single website).

In Queensland, children must be five by June 30 of the year they enrol. In NSW, they tack on an extra month — because why not? — so NSW kids have to be five before July 31 of their first year at primary.

In South Australia, the cut-off is the seemingly arbitrary May 5. And Tasmanian kids have to be five years old by January 1 of the year they begin school.

And yet there’s little to no appetite for a simple standardisation of a school starting age across the country, a move that would lessen confusion and anxiety for parents, make it easier for teachers to prepare for the age of the children they’re teaching and improve learning outcomes overall.

“It’s as though we think it’s too hard so we don’t do it,” says Australian Childcare Alliance president Paul Mondo.

“Maybe it was less of a problem when there was less research about the impact of school starting age. But now we have that research and we know that it’s absolutely important and absolutely in the best interests of our children.”

More data is coming to light every day that shows that children who are on the older end of their class age spectrum have better social and learning outcomes.

The most recent and compelling study comes from the University of NSW which looked at 100,000 children and found that those who were “held back” in order to start school at an older age fared better than their younger peers.

“When we compared their developmental data there was a clear trend: outcomes improved with each additional month of age,” said researcher Dr Mark Hanley.

But when the different states and territories can’t agree on when that age is, parents start taking matters into their own hands.

Facebook pages and online forums are filled with anxious mums and dads tying themselves up in knots over the best time to send their children to school — and consulting phalanxes of educators, psychologists and paediatricians to make sure they get it “right”.

It’s understandable — the wrong decision can affect a kid all the way through to Year 12.

The decision they often make is to err on the side of sending their kids to school older rather than younger, despite the fact that this causes some classrooms to have huge gaps between the youngest and eldest children.

According to the same NSW University study, one quarter of NSW children are being “held back” a year to start school when they’re six or close to six because of concerns that they’ll be significantly younger than their cohorts if they start on time or early.

This means that teachers are trying to formulate a daily classroom routine and curriculum that has to cater to both four-and-a-half year olds and six year olds — a gaping developmental gap at that young age.

It also creates another have and have not divide — as holding a child back may not be something a lower-income family stuck with crippling daycare fees is able to afford.

So why don’t we simply iron out the bumps, level the playing field and agree on an age and stick to it nationwide? For the same reason that anything to do with standardising education gets thrown into the too-hard basket.

It’s something that every state and territory education department would rather buck pass than coalesce to address, and as always the federal education department defers to the states.

Meanwhile, Australia slips further and further down the global rankings of reading, mathematics and scientific literacy.

It’s just another way that Australia struggles to think much beyond “she’ll be right, mate” when it comes to education policy.

And seeing as we can’t even agree on what to call the first year of “big school” around the country — depending on where you live it could be “kindergarten”, “prep” or “reception” — is it any wonder we seem to be so flaccid about addressing anything else?

SOURCE  




No comments: