I remember how it was -- JR
Monday, November 15, 2021
School Choice Denied to Most Rhode Island Families, but Not These Union Teachers
A "secret deal" between a teachers union and a school district allows teachers, but not other parents, to send their children where they choose. (Photo illustration: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)
A local chapter of the nation’s largest teachers union has acknowledged the importance of school choice, at least for its own members.
Thanks to an agreement quietly reached between the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, chapter of the National Education Association and the South Kingstown School Department, teachers there now have access to an exclusive school choice program.
Under the formal agreement, teachers who live outside the South Kingstown Public Schools district may send their children to schools there at no additional cost.
Other parents outside the school district, however, cannot do the same for their children.
About 2,800 students are enrolled in the South Kingstown district, which has seven schools.
“The union is saying—loudly—‘Choice for me but not for thee,’” Lindsey Burke, director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email Tuesday. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
The agreement between the teachers union and the school district “is an admission that school choice is important,” Burke said in the email, adding that “[a]pparently, the unions have finally come around to the notion that money should follow the child to the school that fits her needs!”
School choice programs allow parents to send their children to private schools, charter schools, or schools outside their assigned district at little to no additional cost. Supporters argue that competition spurs officials to improve failing public schools.
School Superintendent Linda Savastano and Brian Nelson, head of the NEA chapter in South Kingstown, signed the agreement June 24. Savastano resigned from the school district four days later amid controversy over her releasing students’ addresses for mailing political material that sought parents’ support for a $85 million school bond on the ballot.
“Many residents in my town believed that this was an agreement signed by a superintendent who made one last backdoor deal before walking out the door,” South Kingstown mom Nicole Solas told The Daily Signal in an email Tuesday.
South Kingstown, a town of about 32,000, is the county seat of Washington County, Rhode Island. It includes 11 villages, among them Kingston, West Kingston, and Wakefield.
Officials did not publicize the pact between the teachers union and the South Kingstown School Department. The Daily Signal learned about the memorandum of agreement from Solas and Goldwater Institute, a conservative public policy and litigation organization based in Phoenix.
A local teacher told Solas about the agreement, and the mom shared the information with Goldwater Institute.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she was able to find the agreement on the school district’s website, but it was “posted in a place where the average resident would not look, because public documents about school business are posted in an entirely different part of the website.”
“It looks like it was deliberately buried and hidden,” she said.
In a recent blog post, Goldwater Institute called the agreement between the school district and the teachers union “a secret deal,” raising questions about the transportation policy specified in the document.
“Under no circumstances will the district be responsible for the transportation of any student enrolled under this provision,” the agreement reads.
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Kathleen Stock: Professor accused of transphobia takes job at ‘anti-woke’ University of Austin
Kathleen Stock, a philosophy professor who resigned from a UK university amid accusations of transphobia, has found a new job at a nascent university that prizes “free thought”.
“Delighted to be invited to be a Founding Faculty Fellow of the University of Austin, a new initiative announced today by @bariweiss alongside several other stellar individuals,” Ms Stock announced on Twitter. “I accepted with alacrity. It’s an exciting looking project, focused on free inquiry.”
Ms Stock had previously taught at the University of Sussex in England. But her controversial public comments on gender identity – including saying “the claim ‘trans women are women’ is a fiction” – angered many students, who demanded her removal in a series of protests. The university refused to fire her, but Ms Stock eventually quit.
“This has been an absolutely horrible time for me and my family,” the professor – who says she is not transphobic – said last month. “I’m putting it behind me now. On to brighter things soon, I hope.”
For Ms Stock, that “brighter thing” appeared to arrive on Monday, when a group of like-minded intellectuals unveiled the University of Austin, a still-in-formation school in Texas devoted to “the fearless pursuit of truth”.
“The reality is that many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinised,” wrote the university’s founding president, Pano Kanelos. “We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.”
Also involved in the project are a number of other public intellectuals who feel victimized by “woke” censorship, including Bari Weiss, a former New York Times editor who resigned amid what she called “bullying by colleagues”.
On Monday, Ms Weiss excitedly announced that Ms Stock would be among the school’s founding faculty members.
“This university will welcome witches who refuse to burn,” she tweeted.
Critics, however, have called the school a vanity project for well-connected media figures, and are dubious of the oppression they’ve supposedly faced.
“People who have the luxury of shouting, ‘I am being silenced!’ from the nation’s op-ed pages and university lecterns are, by definition, not actually being silenced,” The Independent’s Noah Berlatsky wrote in one opinion piece.
The university is still very much in the idea phase. It is not yet accredited, and does not yet have a physical campus. As Ms Stock accepted her new position, she clarified that she is not literally going anywhere.
“PS I should add to avoid confusion – this doesn’t mean I’m moving to Austin,” she tweeted. “And it’s not a full-time role. Just getting involved in various ways from a UK base.”
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Australia: Consumer-minded parents treating schools like shops, says principal
When John Collier, the retiring head of St Andrew’s Cathedral School, began teaching 50 years ago, parents had nothing to do with their kids’ schooling. They didn’t even turn up for parent-teacher interviews. “In many ways they were mystery figures,” he said.
Now, they’re much more involved, and - mostly - that’s a good thing.
But some, Dr Collier says, are behaving like chauffers, cheerleaders and customers while treating schools as a product, rather than a community. At the same time, they’re abrogating their authority and letting children have their way too often.
While leading a previous school, a father told Dr Collier his son had decided to leave. The boy was in year 2. While Dr Collier supports consulting children, they “lack the wisdom of perspective that comes from life experience, so having them make all the decisions is sometimes not good,” he said.
Dr Collier - a graduate of James Ruse Agricultural High - began his career in the early 1970s, teaching English at western Sydney public schools. He has been a principal for 31 years.
In 2018 he famously sent a newsletter to parents saying too many of them had verbally abused, physically threatened or shouted at staff members, and some saw the relationship with teachers as a master-servant one because they were paying fees.
While he says most parents, the silent majority, are supportive, Dr Collier worries about high parental anxiety, and how it affects students. Too often, for example, parents will take children out of a school because of a minor incident.
“There’s an increasing consumer mentality among parents about education, so they can at times approach it much like they will approach buying a garment at a department store,” he said. “If they decide they don’t like it, they’ll take it back and go somewhere else.
“The difficulty is we are dealing with people and not garments, there are relationships that are severed when people move on. Sometimes I see children in middle school who are in their fifth school, it’s very disruptive to their education.
“It teaches them that the first time you see a problem, you flee.”
Dr Collier said too many parents also shielded their children from accountability and negative consequences, while trying to be their friend rather than their guide.
“Parents are less inclined to direct their children as society changes, and more inclined to give the child his or her way,” he said. “My argument is that children need guidance; they have age-appropriate friends. Their parents need to be prepared to make decisions that are unpopular but in the child’s best interest.
“What we sometimes see is parents who’ve taken on the role of cheerleader and chauffeur rather than authoritative parent. This means some parents will defend their child no matter what their child has done, and try to prevent appropriate accountability occurring.
“People take the view that their family is their fort ... and must be defended and advanced, an aspect of growing individualism. Understandably parents are focused right down on their child, whereas schools have to focus on everybody’s child.”
Parental pressure on teachers is only one of the aspects of teaching that have changed during Dr Collier’s career. The job is now far more demanding, salaries have not kept pace, and severe shortages are looming.
He said the teacher shortage was an “urgent” problem; the state’s 39 Anglican schools alone will need another 1700 teachers for new positions - plus replacements for those who retire or leave - in the next eight years.
The most effective way to increase the attractiveness of the profession would be to increase pay, Dr Collier said. “To do so will be expensive, not to do so is in other ways more expensive in terms of the future of the nation,” he said.
“We have a splendid system of education which is often unnecessarily deprecated, but there are structural problems in terms of salary and conditions for teachers, and governments need to deal with those.”
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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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