I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, June 16, 2022
Missouri Attorney General Subpoenas 7 School Districts Amid Worry Over Student Surveying
Surveys in Missouri schools that collect information from students and create a perceived need for a so-called social-emotional learning curriculum have drawn the attention of state officials.
Attorney General Eric Schmitt issued subpoenas last week to seven school districts that allegedly employ student surveys—created by education companies Panorama and Project Wayfinder—that gather data about parents’ political beliefs and income levels, as well as racial identity, sexual behaviors, and mental health.
“Those same groups come in and sell that curriculum to the schools,” said Kimberly Hermann, general counsel with Southeastern Legal Foundation, a national nonprofit law firm that defends liberty.
“The contracts with these companies are public record, so they’re supposed to be approved during school board meetings, but the surveys are happening without parental consent and parental notification.”
In response, Schmitt has opened an investigation into the use of student surveys in Mehlville, Webster Groves, Jefferson City, Lee’s Summit R-7, Park Hill, Springfield, and Neosho schools—with an eye on violations of Missouri’s Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.
“Subjecting students to personal, invasive surveys created by third-party consultants, potentially without parents’ consent, is ridiculous and does nothing to further our children’s education,” Schmitt said in a statement.
Hermann details in a May 1 letter to Schmitt that Webster Groves requires middle school students to take a survey on “LGBTQIA+ Struggles!” that asks: “What are your preferred pronouns, what struggles have you experienced related to LGBTQIA+, and what would you like to see in the school in order to be more inclusive?”
“There are federal statutes that they’re not supposed to ask these questions,” said Andy Wells, the Missouri chapter president of No Left Turn in Education, a national education advocacy organization.
“The problem is that school districts, and some of the companies that are being hired by school districts, don’t care. They just ignore it. They do it anyway and if somebody doesn’t like it, you’ll have to sue them.”
Second-graders were asked, “When is the first time you noticed that people can be different races from you, what did you notice, and do you feel more comfortable around people who look like you?”
“The goal here is to teach these kids that America is a white country of white supremacy and to destroy the nuclear family,” Hermann said. “If bad actors in the progressive left are not stopped, then we’re just going to have a further divide in this country among our kids.”
Neither Panorama nor Project Wayfinder responded by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
Schools often create partnerships with third-party vendors to secure grant money, according to Jill Carter, a candidate for the Missouri Senate’s 32nd District, and by accepting the grant, they are bound to allow the surveying.
“If it’s a platform that’s providing software or technology, especially with the technology in our school’s increasing, there’s less and less ability for the school to even really know what is being asked,” Carter told The Epoch Times.
“They are giving over that oversight, and the teachers sometimes don’t even know, because the kids are online or on a tablet, and that’s part of the software or implementation of some of these programs.”
Among the concerns identified is confidentiality.
“There’s a lot of danger by it,” Wells told The Epoch Times. “The biggest of which is who has access to the data and whether it follows students to college. How is the data being used?”
Another anxiety is whether the information gleaned is creating a profile that flags a need for intervention.
“It’s definitely a force of government and the intervention would be, ‘If we don’t like the way you respond on these surveys, we’re going to recommend intervention,’ and Panorama offers intervention activities and questions,” said Missouri-based Mary Byrne, who holds a doctorate in education from Teacher’s College in Manhattan.
“There’s a menu that you can access for teachers to implement different activities.”
The use of surveys isn’t new, according to Byrne.
“It was done years before, and that’s why the Pupil Privacy Act was put in place,” she said.
The Pupil Privacy Act, also known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment of 1978, prohibits children from participating in surveys and other analyses without parental consent and includes a provision for parents to opt their child out of such evaluations.
But there is no cause of action to file a lawsuit for a violation of federal privacy laws.
“The way Congress wrote the law is you can file an administrative complaint, but under the Biden administration, we know that’s not going anywhere,” Hermann said.
The subpoenas delivered by Schmitt demand documents and information to determine the extent of the surveys and whether parents consented to the surveys prior to distribution to students.
“We’d like him to obtain information regarding where these surveys are coming from and enforce federal and state privacy laws,” Hermann said.
“He has numerous different avenues that he could go based on the law and his investigatory power. So we’re going to leave it to his office to make determinations about what they think the best avenue is.”
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Oregonians Say Education on Wrong Track, Overwhelmingly Support School Choice, Poll Finds
A new poll suggests that Oregon voters are extremely dissatisfied with the state’s K-12 education system and would overwhelmingly support school choice.
Of 727 registered voters polled on June 1, just 25 percent of Democrats, 9.7 percent of Republicans, and 14.1 percent of independents believe that Oregon’s public K-12 education system is on the right track.
The poll, commissioned by the advocacy group Oregon Moms Union and conducted by Nelson Research, also suggests broad support for school choice across party lines, including 59.7 percent of Democrats, 84.5 percent of Republicans, and 77.4 percent of Independents.
School choice gives parents the right to use the tax dollars designated for their child’s education to send their child to the public or private school of their choice.
Only 24.3 percent of those surveyed oppose letting parents have the right to use their tax dollars the way that best serves their child’s needs. Only 3 percent had no opinion.
The results in Oregon mirror a national poll conducted by RealClear Opinion Research in February.
That survey of more than 2,000 registered voters found the concept of school choice enjoys overwhelming support, with 72 percent in favor of the concept and 18 percent opposed. The same holds true across party lines, with 68 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of Independents saying they support such a policy.
That’s up nearly 9 percent since the pandemic began.
“In light of the failures of the public education system navigating COVID, the recent trend of parents pulling kids out of public schools, and continued poor performance indicators, we wanted to know what the public’s appetite is for real education alternatives for parents,” said MacKensey Pulliam, President and Co-Founder of Oregon Moms Union.
“Many parents are already pulling their kids out of the public school system in Oregon so that they no longer have to co-parent with the government and can have choice in their child’s education,” Pulliam told The Epoch Times.
Oregon’s largest district, the Portland Public Schools is feeling the pressure. PPS projects that next year’s enrollment will be down 14 percent from pre-pandemic levels. Other districts around the state are experiencing a similar trend.
Christine Drazan, a Republican candidate for Governor and former Oregon House Minority Leader, weighed in on the problems plaguing Oregon’s K-12 education system.
“Despite record funding levels, our graduation rates and student achievement remain stubbornly low,” she told The Epoch Times. “At the same time, what’s best for our kids too often takes a backseat to political agendas and the voices of parents are overridden by bureaucrats with too much power and misguided priorities.”
“We need to get back to basics in our schools … and focus on ensuring that our students know how to read, write, and do math,” she added.
If public schools can’t get that done, she supports school choice.
“Access to a classroom environment that best fits the needs of a student is essential to their ability to succeed,” Drazan continued. “For many students, the traditional classroom is just fine. For others, a charter school or other format might be more ideal.”
During the past two years, increasing numbers of parents have already “voted with their feet” for school choice, wrote Kathryn Hickock, executive vice president at the Portland-based Cascade Policy Institute.
Since the COVID pandemic began, 8.7 million children switched from public to private schools nationwide, she wrote on the advocacy group’s website.
In Oregon, charter school enrollment increased 20.8 percent between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. Today, nearly 36,000 of the state’s 560,000 students attend 131 charter schools.
The number of Oregon homeschooled students increased 73 percent between the last two school years, according to Hickock.
Nationwide, 11.1 percent of American households with school-aged children report they are now homeschooling. That’s double the percentage compared to before the pandemic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
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Australia: Boys falling far behind girls in HSC and at university
The feminization of education reaps its inevitable rewards. It starts in primary school with the idea that boys are inherently disgusting, obnoxious, violent, and disrespectful, and asking them to sit the heck down during class and pay attention to the teacher. It is a system where boys are punished for behaving like boys and have few if any male teacher role models
Boys are falling far behind girls in school-leaving exams and at university to the extent that a University Admissions Centre (UAC) analysis of results found that being male was “greater than any of the other recognised disadvantages we looked at”.
The centre looked at Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) and first-year university grade point average data and found the gender education gap persisted across socio-economic quartiles at both senior school and university levels.
Educators said there could be many factors at play, including different maturity levels, the compulsory inclusion of English in the HSC, which tended to favour girls, the declining popularity of difficult maths and sciences, and the increase in the school-leaving age.
Jennifer Buckingham, a reading expert who has studied the gender education gap in a previous role at the Centre for Independent Studies, said all jobs, including trades, now needed workers with strong literacy and numeracy skills. “The options for boys who don’t do well at school are becoming fewer and fewer,” she said.
“The expectations of what they can achieve change, they set their sights lower, and there are economic consequences of that too.”
The UAC analysis of ATAR data over many years, but particularly from 2020, found there was gender parity at the top end of the ATAR scale, above 98, and at the bottom end, below 39, but boys were far outnumbered by girls in the middle range.
The analysis said boys were under-represented due to a “combination of boys not performing as well as girls placed at similar points in the gender ability spectrum, and, more importantly, boys choosing study patterns that do not make them eligible for an ATAR or an HSC”.
The centre’s analysis found an ATAR-aged boy was 16.3 per cent less likely to obtain an HSC qualification than a girl in the same group, and 15 per cent less likely to complete at least one subject in 2020 than girls. “The effect of being male was greater than any of the other recognised disadvantages we looked at,” the analysis found.
The gap persists into university, the UAC analysis found, with boys enrolling at lower rates, less likely to pass all their subjects, and more likely to fail everything. The issue was across socio-economic quartiles.
NSW Department of Education data also show boys are also more likely to skip school. Attendance among high school girls is more than 82 per cent, compared with less than 73 per cent for boys. Boys also represent 70 per cent of school suspensions.
Robin Nagy, the director of Academic Profiles, which examines data for the independent sector, said the gap could be partly due to NSW requiring English to count towards a fifth of a student’s HSC mark. “On average, girls would appear to benefit more from this requirement than boys, due to the archetype of girls performing better in English,” he said.
Female enrolments outnumber male ones in the harder English subjects, which scale to higher ATAR marks, and boys were over-represented in easier subjects.
Craig Petersen, the head of the Secondary Principals Council, which represents public school principals, said there had also been significant efforts over several decades to ensure girls were catered to in HSC examinations.
“In response to the research that shows girls respond better to narrative questions, we started seeing scientific or mathematical problems voiced as a story,” he said.
This so-called “feminisation” of the HSC physics and chemistry syllabuses, in particular, was wound back in the most recent revision of the syllabuses, released in 2018, which had greater focus on mathematical applications and less on sociology-based content.
Petersen said boys also matured more slowly than girls; the prefrontal cortex, which helps people understand the consequences of their actions, does not finish developing for boys until 25. “That may be the area that says, ‘I want to have a good job, therefore I need to study hard’.”
The decision to raise the school-leaving age to 17 about a decade ago also meant boys who would once have left after year 10 for a trade were now staying on, Petersen said. “[Some] fall into this malaise, they don’t really want to be there, aren’t motivated,” he said.
Melissa Abu-Gazaleh is the managing director of the Top Blokes Foundation, which advocates addressing the health and wellbeing of young men to increase their engagement in school.
She said many young men were still tied to the stereotype that they should not express vulnerability or seek help, and expressed their frustration in outbursts, which led to disciplinary action.
“This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the male student then has lower aspirations to be better or achieve more,” she said. Giving male students a different message about seeking help and positive role models would help, she said.
Concerned that boys needed more help, Dapto High principal Andrew FitzSimons appointed a boys’ mentor, Andrew Horsley, who works with the Top Blokes Foundation and local service providers to ensure boys get the support they need.
“For me, it’s all about developing connections,” Horsley said. “With boys, sometimes you need to spend a bit of time and effort and energy to develop those connections, and then they’ll feel safer, if they’re struggling with something.”
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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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