Are teachers essential or not?

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, everyone was sent home—everyone except essential workers. Health care workers continued to take care of patients. Police and firefighters continued to patrol streets and fight fires. Grocery store workers continued to stock shelves. Even workers in meatpacking plants, where some outbreaks occurred, continued to do their jobs. They continued to work because they were “essential.” Their jobs were so important to the lives of others that we asked them to take additional risk to continue providing their goods or services to us. Now, as schools are slated to reopen, the essential question we must ask is whether or not teachers are “essential.”

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of schools reopening, there are some fundamental facts here. First, putting kids together with 20 plus students in a classroom and crowded hallways undoubtedly increases the risk of spread. We can debate how much kids transmit the virus or how few deaths occur among children below the age of 18. These are all important conversations to have. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that schools packed with children are a petri dish where germs (and viruses) are spread. Kids will be kids. They will not effectively social distance and they will not wear their masks with fidelity. Without question, teachers in schools would have a much higher risk of catching COVID than teachers working from their living room.

The second unmistakable fact is that not opening schools will lead to large disruptions in the workforce. Parents without other options will be forced to quit their jobs or work from home as they help their children navigate the new online educational environment. This disruption will lead to decreased productivity and could have long-term negative impacts on the economy. Again, there are other issues we could debate, but there is no denying that closing schools will impact the livelihoods of many families.

We ask essential workers to face greater risks because the products of their labor—their service to us or the goods they produce—are integral to the lives of other people. We do not deny that they increase their risk by going to work. We do not deny that sending essential workers home would impact the lives of others.

It does feel strange that the clearest voices arguing that teachers are not essential are the teachers themselves, while the most persuasive essay arguing they are essential that I have read comes from a nurse.

So, I return to the central question—are teachers essential? I’ll let you, dear reader, determine the answer to this question yourself.

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School's Out: Portland's Quiet Crisis

We’ve got good news and bad news out of Portland, Oregon.

The bad news? Portland Public Schools announced that public schools will not be reopening in September.

The good news? Portland Public Schools announced that public schools will not be reopening in September.

No, but seriously.

It’s the conservative conundrum, created by the coronavirus pandemic: how to balance criticizing the Democrat-driven, pandemic-blamed, unscientific school shut-downs while at the same time acknowledging that these same institutions of learning have played a detrimental and corrosive role in terms of eroding patriotic American values among many in the younger generations.

As Rush Limbaugh writes in his August Limbaugh Letter:

I believe the fundamental problem we face in America can be boiled down to the one thing we lost, which has given birth to all of this left-wing insanity: our education system. We’ve lost the teachers. Which is why American schools are the petri dishes of leftism.

Question: As we assail the fact that millions of children are forced to languish at home under orders from Dicto-Crats like Michigan Governor Gretchen “Shut-Down Artist” Whitmer, parked in front of computers, with no shared learning, no peer group companionship, and no extracurricular activities including sports, is it possible to take solace in the fact that at least the kids are getting a break from face-to-face exposure to the twisted purveyors of anti-American self-loathing and Marxist propaganda?

Homeschoolers would answer in the affirmative, but their numbers simply don’t cover the breadth of the problem: millions upon millions of kids that need to be educated while the greatest economy on earth is sustained. 

It was announced in late July, as reported by NBC Portland affiliate KGW, that due to the COVID pandemic, Portland Public Schools (PPS) will offer only distance learning for the first quarter of the upcoming school year. Incidentally, that quarter ends on November 5, two days after Election Day. A scroll-down reveals that officials will inform parents by October 10 as to if/when schools will reopen.

From the KGW report:

According to Gov. [Kate] Brown’s new set of COVID-19 metrics, in order to resume any in-person learning, even part-time, a county needs to have less than 10 cases per 100,000 people for three weeks straight, with some exceptions for certain very small rural school districts.

Where are we going with this? For the schoolchildren of Portland, nowhere. Even if these metrics are met, it is unlikely that PPS is going to send the kids back in November, going into full winter, the region’s coldest, wettest, season, when windows are tightly closed, recesses are often held indoors, and sicknesses other than COVID peak. Distance learning is the new normal in many Democrat-run school districts–film at eleven. The next reassessment: anybody’s guess. What we have here, to paraphrase Alice Cooper, is school’s out, for the unforeseeable future. By the way: the lock-down applies to K-12 in both private and public schools.

Unless—and this is where we enter the realm of pure conjecture—Joe Biden miraculously or underhandedly pulls off a victory on November 3. Then, might PPS precipitously green-light the resumption of live learning? We just don’t know, but conservatives can be forgiven for thinking that if Biden wins, Democrat pandemic policy across the board will suddenly change.

The reality is that we can’t nail down any indication of a scientific method informing the Democrat calculations. There’s no question that the powerful education lobbies and teachers’ unions are part of the Democrat machine, and desperately want President Trump dispatched and a Joe Biden Trojan Horse presidency. The question is: how far will they go?

While perpetual civil unrest and rioting have drawn national attention to Portland, the less dramatic but equally fraught subject of the public-school lockdown is quietly roiling the neighborhoods. Parents across the city, population 654,741 (2019 estimate,) are scrambling to arrange for whatever it is they’re going to do when in-person school doesn’t start.

Options and analysis: for young children (kindergarten through sixth grade) for whom parental homeschooling is not a viable or desired long-term solution, the choices are private daycare, shared childcare among parental groups, grandparents and/or other family, or mothers and fathers working from home when possible, taking leaves of absence when necessary. Whatever it takes to provide the constant supervision elementary-level children need. In the time and places of the COVID lockdowns, the best-case scenario may be having a stay-at-home mom or dad whose only job is to care for and educate young children.

Teenage minors (middle and high school) are better able to fend for themselves, but that age group is another column. Re: Single parents without financial or familial resources; we’re looking at people who have to quit jobs if they’re not already unemployed and go on the dole to survive.

What about those private childcare businesses, as differentiated from the shut down K-12 schools? In addition to the closures of public and private schools till fall, the state issued guidelines for such businesses, 29 pages worth, in 14 sections.

Here’s a taste, from an Oregon Public Broadcasting report on the guidelines:

The requirements are complex and detailed. For instance, the rules for facial coverings are different, depending on the ages of the people involved. All staff must wear face coverings at all times — that’s a tighter rule than in previous guidance, which only required masks for staff who interacted with multiple groups of children.

Children who are at least five are also required to wear face coverings, consistent with a mandate Brown issued earlier this week. For children between two and five, wearing a mask is up to the parent or guardian; and toddlers and infants under two in daycare settings should not wear masks “because safety considerations outweigh the benefit of reducing transmission,” according to stakeholder input.

Complex and detailed, yes, but do they pass scientific muster? Wouldn’t those toddlers and infants without masks theoretically be the weak link in the anti-viral protocols? Conversely, if statistics show that young children are not generally susceptible to the worst ravages of coronavirus, and don’t easily transmit it, who are we protecting here?

What is the American left doing here?

As insane, destructive, and unprecedentedly naked this partisan power gambit seems to be, it can only be understood as the promulgation of chaos. The calculated stoking of the abiding flame of upheaval. Chaos of a different kind than is roiling the streets of Portland and other blue-state cities.

Chaos that is seen as an expedient strategy in the minds and nefarious designs of a desperate, extreme-left Democratic Party willing to stop at nothing to achieve power.


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Will segregation come to King’s College London?

A new report suggests students should be allowed to pick the race, gender and religion of their tutors.

Although founded as an orthodox Anglican institution in 1836, King’s College London became officially secular in 1903. After that, its steadfast refusal to classify people in terms of their religion or personal opinion, whether in teaching or otherwise, for a long time made it an intellectual powerhouse where independent scholarship flourished.

No longer, unfortunately. Identity politics has caught up with King’s with a vengeance. An eight-page report from its geography department was picked up by the press last week. It is apparently officially sanctioned – at the very least, it was partly funded by the department, and appears on the departmental website under the KCL logo with no disclaimer or statement that it merely represents one point of view. It makes for some interesting reading.

Entitled Inclusivity at University: Muslim Student Experiences, this document supposedly promotes ‘inclusivity’. When dissected, however, it actually turns out to be a demand for education to take second place to identity. (Perhaps this is not surprising, since its production was funded not only by the department but also by Athena SWAN, an organisation ostensibly devoted to promoting race and sex equality in universities which actually promotes some surprisingly doctrinaire views on race and gender.)

The report starts with statistics showing that nationally Muslims are poorer than other religious groups. They also drop out of university more frequently than other faith groups, and get less good degrees when they stay. It then identifies Muslims with BAME people more generally, on the slightly facile ground that most Muslims are non-white. Finally, it goes on to make quite a number of recommendations. These are worth a close look. All of them should worry anyone who believes in a university as a group of scholars united dispassionately in the pursuit of knowledge.

First, inclusivity means more student society get-togethers must, it is argued, be non-alcoholic. Apart from the innate puritanism and bossiness of this proposal, it’s not the end of the world, although it is still a bit much to ask not only that non-alcoholic drink be made available, but also that alcohol not be served at all in order to satisfy the desires of a minority. But there are bigger fish to fry here.

More significant is the demand to curb the proliferation of ‘white geographies’ (sic). What is taught must instead, it is said, ‘reflect the experiences of a diverse range of students, allowing minority students to see themselves as legitimate creators of knowledge’. ‘White geographies’ presumably means something more than the geography of European and other white countries, since the KCL curriculum already goes well beyond that. What this seems to indicate is that geography teaching at KCL, rather than embodying the sceptical empiricism usually associated with universities, should take as a starting point the existence of institutional racism, colonial structures, and so on. Put shortly, this is a proposal for the blatant politicisation of teaching as instruction would be given from one preferred point of view.

Next, we have a proposal that the work of Muslim scholars, as well as black and indigenous writers, must be emphasised because they are ‘relevant to the lived experiences of students’, and that the curriculum should be adjusted according to what those students demand. It is difficult to see what is most insulting here to any academic or student who genuinely wants to learn. It could be the suggestion that, in a world where academic publication is overwhelmingly subject to blind peer review, the quality or relevance of a scholar’s work should be judged according to his religious conviction or the colour of his skin. It also insinuates that Muslim students value intellectual production more highly according to whether the writer is a co-religionist, and that – unlike traditional students – they come to university not to have their minds stretched, but just to see what is already familiar to them.

Much the same goes for the now-familiar insistence that universities need to hire more BAME staff. This particular report calls for more ‘Muslim role models’. But a respectable student surely does not care about the religion or ethnicity of those teaching him: the suggestion that Muslims are any different in this respect, or that they need some kind of remedial help from ‘role models’, should have any Muslim student who wishes to participate equally in university life up in arms.

Right at the end, however, is something even more interesting. It is worth quoting as it appears:

‘Departments should also ensure that Muslim students are finding the support and connections they seek… The geography department runs an excellent mentoring programme which may be further improved if mentees had the option of highlighting different preferences for their mentors – in relation to gender, ethnicity and religion.’

You read the second sentence right. Segregation by reference to sex and religious affiliation should be not just be tolerated but actively encouraged by the university. A woman should be able to request not to be tutored except by a woman, a man by a man, and a Muslim by a Muslim (or does it go further: should a Shiite be given the opportunity to say he would really rather not have a Sufi or liberal Muslim as a tutor?). So much for the idea of KCL as a liberal, secular institution that transcends religious divides and doesn’t believe in sex discrimination.

The third criterion – ethnicity – should worry us even more. Yes, a black student should, it seems, be given the opportunity to request a black personal tutor, apparently on the basis that this would be to everyone’s advantage because, well, black people understand black people better, and then everyone gets on. This sort of venomous nonsense was bad enough when spouted in broad South-African accents by blockheaded Boers in Bloemfontein in 1970. That it should be repeated and apparently believed by otherwise bright students in 2020 is much more worrying.

If KCL really does accept this view, it is a scandal. If it doesn’t, then it needs to make its position clear very quickly indeed.

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Federal Judge Refuses to Block Campus Sexual Assault Rules

The rules will expand the rights of the accused, narrow the definition of sexual harassment and reduce the scope of cases that schools are required to investigate

A federal judge on Wednesday allowed the Education Department to move forward with new rules governing how schools and universities respond to complaints of sexual assault.

The rules, which take effect Friday, expand the rights of the accused, narrow the definition of sexual harassment and reduce the scope of cases that schools are required to investigate, among other changes.

In a suit challenging the rules, attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia argued that the policy would block schools from investigating certain sexual abuse complaints and would discourage students from reporting assaults.

“As a result, fewer sexual harassment complaints will be filed, and schools will be less well equipped to protect their students’ safety and rid their programs and activities of the pernicious effects of sex discrimination,” the suit said.

But U.S. District Judge Carl. J. Nichols rejected those arguments.

“Plaintiffs are free to investigate and punish as violations of their codes of conduct or of state law behavior that does not meet the new definition of sexual harassment under the Final Rule,” Nichols wrote.

He also turned aside an argument that the rules would bring heavy costs for schools and limit their ability to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Court recognizes the obvious seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic," he wrote. “In fact, for these and other reasons, a later effective date might have been a preferable policy decision.”

Still, he said, the Education Department took the pandemic into account when it issued the new rules, and schools have long known that a new policy would be coming.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the ruling is “yet another victory for students and reaffirms that students’ rights under Title IX go hand in hand with basic American principles of fairness and due process.”

DeVos issued her policy May 6 after rescinding earlier guidelines from the Obama administration in 2017. Victims’ advocates say the 2017 rules forced colleges to confront sexual abuse after ignoring it for years. But DeVos has said the guidelines turned campus disciplinary panels into “kangaroo courts” that were too quick to punish accused students.

DeVos' rules, which carry the weight of law, tell schools how to implement Title IX, the 1972 law barring discrimination based on sex in education.

Under her overhaul, the definition of sexual harassment is narrowed to "unwelcome conduct determined by a reasonable person to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it denies a person access to a school’s education programs or activity.

The policy will now require colleges to investigate claims only if they’re reported to certain officials, and schools can be held accountable for mishandling complaints only if they acted with “deliberate indifference.” Opponents also took exception with a provision allowing students to question one another through representatives at live hearings.

DeVos on Wednesday said the rules require schools “to act in meaningful ways to support survivors of sexual misconduct without sacrificing important safeguards to protect free speech and provide all students with a transparent, reliable process.”

The case challenging the rules was led by attorneys general in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California, with backing from a total of 17 states and the District of Columbia.

“We’re disappointed that the court denied our motion to stay the new Title IX rule while our litigation is pending," Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said. "But our commitment to the right of every Pennsylvania student to safe and equitable education has not wavered, and our challenge to Secretary DeVos’s unlawful rule is not over, this is merely the first step in a long process.”

The challenge was supported by the American Council on Education, an association of university presidents, along with 24 other higher education organizations. In a June legal brief, the groups said the policy ordered a “sea change” for colleges but gave them less than three months to implement it.

“In the best of times, that deadline would be unreasonable. But in light of the extraordinary burdens that have been placed on American colleges and universities in the wake of the COVID-19 global pandemic, that August 14 implementation deadline is problematic in the extreme,” the groups wrote.

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