I remember how it was -- JR
'Cult-Retreat-Like Experience': California School District Trained Staff to Use Preferred Pronouns, Names
The Los Angeles Unified School District required its staff to participate in "socioemotional learning" training that involved educators agreeing to use students' preferred names and pronouns.
According to nonprofit parents group Parents Defending Education, a district staff member said the training consisted of "critical social justice gender ideology." The staff member also said staff were led by a "restorative justice teacher" and that they were given handouts to "address" instances in which students or staff make an "unacceptable error in words or actions that are against gender ideology."
The staff member called this training a "cult-retreat-like experience."
During the training, staff members were called to "raise our hands if we could commit to using preferred pronouns and STAND UP if we commit to using trans students' preferred names."
If staff failed to stand up, the staff member explained, "it was an obvious sign that you're problematic and bigoted and in the wrong."
The handout provided to staff, titled "Identity Working Terms," defines the term "gender identity" as "our innermost feelings of who we are as a woman, man, both, and/or neither." The handout also states that people can communicate their gender identity through actions, clothing, hairstyles, makeup use, voices, body movements and "other forms of presentation."
One page of the handout is titled "Interrupting Bias: Calling Out vs. Calling In" and encourages staff to call someone out for several perceived problems, including when their "words or actions are unacceptable and will not be tolerated" and when an interruption is needed to "prevent further harm."
The handout also offers examples of phrases for staff to use when calling someone out for "unacceptable" language. One example of this is, "That word/comment is really triggering and offensive. Be mindful and pick a different word."
It also claims students have the "right" to be referred to by their "chosen name/pronouns, regardless of their legal or school records," adding that a student's legal name change "is NOT required for unofficial name changes."
Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neily slammed the district's required training for staff as "appalling" and an indication that the district values social issues over learning core subjects like math and science.
"Pressuring LAUSD employees to adopt language with which they may disagree - and encouraging others to bully, intimidate, and silence dissenting views - is appalling. This took place during an all-staff mandated school hours 'training' during a shortened school day, which places a significant burden on working families," she said in a statement to Townhall. "By prioritizing topics like this over students' mastery of core subject areas, district administrators have shown that they prioritize social issues over learning."
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NYC schools bracing for budget realities of 120K enrollment drop-off
Schools Chancellor David Banks addressed the City Council’s education committee Monday on the proposed education budget, which accounts for student enrollment predictions and trends. Previously during the pandemic, schools did not lose funding if enrollment dropped.
According to the department, 120,000 students and families have left city schools over the last five years.
“How many more will come back? We don’t know. So we have to hope for the best but plan for the worst,” Banks told the committee.
Much of the loss can be attributed to a decline in new enrollees, the Independent Budget Office found this month. That includes families in some of the city’s traditionally most sought-after school districts, encompassing neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Park Slope.
“For our schools to deliver on their original promise of serving as the engine of the American dream, we will need to do things very differently in ways that build trust one big step at a time,” said Banks.
To help get families back or new families enrolled, Banks said the system needs to connect students with the “real world” and “what matters to them,” and engage parents as partners.
“It is the biggest complaint that I’ve heard since I started as chancellor — parents have felt unheard and disrespected,” he said.
Banks added many schools experienced “big changes” in enrollment over the last few years that have not yet been reflected in their budgets. To soften the blow next school year and the following, the system will spend $160 million and $80 million in federal funding to partially make up those losses.
Council members pushed Banks on efforts to bolster enrollment, and how those tie into other problems the system faces, like run-down buildings and other crumbling infrastructure.
“You want to bring them back, but the environment has to also be inviting,” said Council Member Rita Joseph of District 40 in Brooklyn, a former teacher who heads the education committee. “Most of them look like jails. They said the colors are terrible, the settings are horrible.”
Banks, who had previously characterized shrinking enrollment as an “indictment” of the DOE he inherited, encouraged city leaders to foster a more positive, “new narrative” that could help reach families.
“We’re also trying to be fiscally prudent as well, as we look at what these trends are demonstrating. So it is disturbing, and so we’ve got tough choices that we have to make here,” Banks said.
“How do we get families to re-engage, and to trust, and want to come back into our schools? That will solve a lot of these other financial issues that we have.”
https://nypost.com/2022/03/21/schools-preliminary-budget-reflects-student-enrollment-drop/
***********************************************Mob Rule and Cancel Culture at Hastings Law School
By Ilya Shapiro
I’ve given more than 1,000 speeches in my career, and I’d never been protested—until March 1, when dozens of students shut down my event at San Francisco’s UC Hastings College of the Law. In January the school’s Federalist Society chapter invited me to talk about my recent book on the politics of judicial nominations, a subject that became timelier with Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement.
On Jan. 26 I tweeted in opposition to President Biden’s decision to limit his nominee pool by race and sex. I argued that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the best candidate, meaning that everyone else was less qualified, so if Mr. Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I characterized as a “lesser black woman.” I deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words, but I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered “all possible nominees,” as 76% of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll.
I was about to start a new job as a senior lecturer at Georgetown and executive director of its law school’s Center for the Constitution. Georgetown placed me on paid leave pending an investigation into whether I violated any university policy. I can’t comment on that investigation because eight weeks later it’s still in process.
It’s clear that a vocal minority of Hastings students wanted to hear neither my reasoning about Mr. Biden’s selection criteria nor my broader analysis now that there is a nominee. They screamed obscenities and physically confronted me, several times getting in my face or blocking my access to the lectern, and they shouted down a dean.
They also castigated their school for allowing me to speak and circulated a letter demanding “a committee of diverse student representatives” to approve speakers as well as mandatory training in critical race theory for students and faculty. Never mind that Hastings, a public institution, would be violating the First Amendment if it disapproved speakers based on their viewpoints.
And never mind that preventing a duly invited speaker from speaking is against UC Hastings’s rules. The school’s chancellor wrote in a communitywide email the next day: “Disrupting an event to prevent a speaker from being heard is a violation of our policies and norms . . . which the College will—indeed, must—enforce.”
But don’t hold your breath for anybody to be disciplined there or at Yale Law School, where an event was similarly disrupted the next week. Too few administrators follow the example of the University of Chicago’s Robert Zimmer. In response to pressure to punish Prof. Dorian Abbot for criticizing affirmative action, Mr. Zimmer reaffirmed his commitment to faculty members’ freedom to “disagree with any policy or approach of the University . . . without being subject to discipline, reprimand or other form of punishment.”
You’d think that law students should have a particular appreciation for spirited and open engagement with provocative ideas. They’ve chosen a career that centers on argument and persuasion.
But alas a heckler’s veto prevailed. I’d welcome the opportunity to return to Hastings—or anywhere—to discuss the Supreme Court. It’s even more important to have a national reckoning about our inability to discuss controversial issues without canceling our opponents.
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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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