I remember how it was -- JR
Wednesday, September 01, 2021
Woke LA Teachers' Union Boss Offers Insane Defense of School Lockdowns
A new Los Angeles Magazine profile of "controversial" United Teachers Los Angeles head Cecily Myart-Cruz reveals the wild thoughts of the woke social justice warrior representing LA's 33,000 public school teachers.
Myart-Cruz was one of the teacher's union bosses who insisted schools remain shuttered for months during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and she was clear that she doesn't regret subjecting children to subpar instruction nor the outcomes of learning through a computer for more than a year.
"There is no such thing as learning loss," she maintains in an interview for the profile. "Our kids didn't lose anything," she said despite numerous studies and anecdotes of students falling behind without in-person instruction. Her rationale for such a claim, however, is even more absurd.
"It's OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables," she explained before suggesting what they did learn over the months of isolation wrought by forced distance learning:
They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.
This insane rationale also implies that the education provided by the teachers Myart-Cruz represents is unimportant and inconsequential. The same teachers for whom Myart-Cruz demands more money can apparently be replaced — following her logic — by a student just sitting at home and watching TV.
The comments from Myart-Cruz aren't all that surprising given her activism that has frequently strayed beyond school issues. She's advocated for Medicare for all, tax increases, taxpayer-funded services for illegal immigrants, eviction moratoriums, and a boycott of Israel.
She's even to the left of embattled California Governor Gavin Newsom whose attempt at reopening schools she slammed as "a receipt for propagating structural racism." And when parents pleaded for Los Angeles teachers to return to the classroom, Myart-Cruz attacked their concerns for their children as a "product of their unexamined privilege."
Even as the 2021 back-to-school season hits full swing across the country, Myart-Cruz remained cagey at the time of her interview about the prospect of LA schools being in-person. "We will be going back to the table for that conversation" because "education is political," she told Los Angeles Magazine.
And while she claims to be an advocate for underprivileged students and families, Myart-Cruz's tenure has disproportionately harmed those same students. "School closings have arguably done the most damage to those in poorer communities," explains the LA Mag profile. "An astonishing 64 percent of L.A. Unified's middle- and high-schoolers—some 129,000 kids—were not actively engaging in the district's online learning program" last spring. "Hardly any of the district's 229,000 elementary school students were logging on at all... A significant portion were doubtless from disadvantaged neighborhoods with working parents and less access to technology."
Nevertheless, Myart-Cruz persists in her woke campaign apparently unconcerned with the welfare of Los Angeles students. As she herself said, it's all about politics — student wellbeing be damned.
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Teacher Fired After Speaking Against Gender Identity, Critical Race Theory, and Mask Mandates
A Louisiana teacher says he was fired after speaking out against the teaching of critical race theory, gender identity ideology, and mask mandates in his school district.
Now Jonathan Koeppel says he wants to be a voice for anyone who is “sick and tired of being pushed around by the public education system just for being conservative.”
For over a year, Koeppel had voiced concerns on social media and at school board meetings over the teaching of woke ideology. The high school Spanish teacher also has been an opponent of the mask mandates.
“I was completely fed up with the far left’s agenda to brainwash children,” Koeppel, who considers himself a conservative, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday when asked why he chose to speak out against certain policies in St. Tammany Parish Public Schools.
“I started noticing kids talking about political topics that were being brought up in other classes by their teachers, and realized that someone had to get this conversation started,” he said. “I just happened to be that someone.”
A Louisiana native, Koeppel, 26, began teaching Spanish at Fontainebleau High School in Mandeville, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, in 2020.
Just over a year later, on Aug. 13, he received a letter signed by school district Superintendent Frank Jabbia notifying him of his dismissal. The letter did not contain a reason for his termination, Koeppel said.
The Daily Signal sought comment from Jabbia and Peter Jabbia, associate superintendent of human resources.
“We cannot comment on personnel matters,” Meredith Mendez, the school district’s communications director, responded in an email Wednesday.
No ‘Legitimate Reason’ for Firing
Koeppel said he intends to file a lawsuit against the district. In an email Thursday to The Daily Signal, his lawyer, Kevin Vogeltanz, said:
The evidence suggests that Mr. Koeppel was not terminated for any legitimate reason but because of the protected, political beliefs he expressed in public on a range of issues, including the recent requirement that all teachers and students in the school system wear face coverings while in school.
Koeppel first gained media attention in April, after a video of him speaking at a school board meeting went viral.
During that meeting, the Spanish teacher raised concerns about the St. Tammany Parish school system’s use of an education application called BrainPOP. The app contains content that tells “our black children that they are oppressed by white people,” Koeppel, who is white, said after playing an audio clip from the app.
Koeppel played a second BrainPOP audio clip that tells children how to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “they,” when someone’s preferred pronoun isn’t known.
Adults can choose how they want to live their lives, but “don’t push this ideology on children,” Koeppel pleaded with the school board.
After that board meeting, Johnny Vitrano, principal of Fontainebleau High School, called Koeppel into his office.
“The principal was like, ‘This is on the internet, be careful, you have a target on your back … ,’” Koeppel told The Daily Signal, adding that his interpretation of the conversation was that the principal didn’t want to bring negative attention to the school.
‘Indoctrinating Kids’
Koeppel spoke again at a school board meeting in May. This time, he raised concerns about high school teachers “indoctrinating kids in [the] classroom and discriminating based on political affiliation,” he told The Daily Signal during a phone call Tuesday.
One day after that board meeting, Vitrano again called the teacher into his office. The principal explained that Koeppel should not speak at board meetings, but “just talk to him,” Koeppel said.
Vitrano did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Over the summer, Koeppel said, he continued to speak out on education issues in Louisiana and across America, including at a state Senate hearing and conservative conferences.
Koeppel returned to work Aug. 3 at Fontainebleau High School. When he entered the school cafeteria where teachers were gathered for a “welcome back” breakfast, he said, his principal immediately approached.
Vitrano asked whether he was going to wear a mask because of COVID-19, Koeppel recalled.
When the teacher said no, Vitrano instructed him to leave campus and informed him of a hearing Aug. 5 about his job.
Koeppel told The Daily Signal that he already had received a medical exemption from the school, allowing him not to wear a mask because of a boxing injury. The teacher said he believes the principal either forgot or did not know the exemption had been approved.
The Aug. 5 hearing ended soon after it was determined that the school had approved Koeppel’s exemption from the mask mandate, the teacher said.
‘Sick and Tired’
That evening, Koeppel again spoke at a school board meeting, this time against the school’s mask mandate, which follows Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards’ statewide requirement that masks be worn indoors.
The next day, the school district barred him from “all school board property, activities, and meetings,” Koeppel said.
Vitrano and an assistant superintendent, Michael Cossé, called Koeppel to a second hearing Aug. 10. They said they had concerns about his “social media, the things I do in public, shooting guns and having videos of that—all kinds of free speech issues,” Koeppel said.
Three days later, the school district formally fired him.
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Public School Teacher: 'I Have 180 Days to Turn [Students] Into Revolutionaries'
Days after a California teacher’s TikTok video boasting about how she told students to pledge allegiance to a gay flag went viral, Project Veritas has exposed more indoctrination in the classroom coming out of a Sacramento-area high school.
An AP government teacher, who described himself as being “as far left as you can go,” was secretly recorded explaining how he radicalizes students in the classroom and encourages them to “show up for protests, community events, tabling, food distribution, all sorts of things” as extra credit.
“I have 180 days to turn them [students] into revolutionaries,” teacher Gabriel Gipe said.
His classroom has an Antifa flag, a gay pride flag, and a photo of Mao Zedong.
“I have an Antifa flag on my [classroom] wall and a student complained about that — he said it made him feel uncomfortable. Well, this [Antifa flag] is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable, so if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn’t be aligning with the values that this [Antifa flag] is antithetical to,” he recalled telling the student.
Gipe also praised China’s Cultural Revolution.
“You need a two-pronged system, which is exactly what Huey Newton and Fred Hampton [Black Panther Party] understood. You need propaganda of the deed -- your economics -- and cultural propaganda as well. You need to retrain the way people think. So, the Cultural Revolution in the 60s was fixing the problem that came about after the economic one,” he said.
“What can we do now to root out this culture that keeps perpetuating hyper-individualism, hyper-competitiveness, capitalist exploitation and consolidation of wealth…I do think that it’s important to understand that as an extension of an economic revolution, they [Chinese Communist Party] were changing the base, and then they went to change the superstructure. You cannot change one without the other. You can’t have cultural shifts without the economic shift, and vice versa,” he said.
“I think that for [left-wing] movements in the United States, we need to be able to attack both [cultural and economic] fronts. Right? We need to create parallel structures of power because we cannot rely on the state…Consistently focusing on education and a change of cultural propaganda. We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this is what we actually need.” (Project Veritas)
The public-school teacher said he keeps tabs on his students’ political beliefs and pointed out that each year they are identifying as more and more extreme.
“So, they take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left,” he described. “I'm like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left.”
And Gipe is not alone in his beliefs at the school.
"There are three other teachers in my department that I did my credential program with -- and they’re rad," he said. "They’re great people. They’re definitely on the same page.”
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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)
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