Tuesday, August 23, 2022



A California elementary school principal took flak this week for calling the police on a 4-year-old child for not wearing a mask to school

The incident occurred on Thursday at Theuerkauf Elementary School in Mountain View when the principal refused to allow the boy to enter the school because he wasn’t wearing a mask, KGO-TV reported.

A video recorded by the father of the child shows the principal telling him, “I welcome him here and I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again — I want him here, but it is our district’s policy that students have to wear a mask.”

Another video shows the little boy being escorted out of the school with a piece of paper that he hands to his father. He asks, “Daddy, what does it say?”

A police officer was also called to make sure the 4-year-old was barred from entering the school.

It probably isn’t much of a surprise that this sort of lunacy continues to occur in California.

The boy’s father, identified only as “Shawn,” told KGO that he thinks it’s time to get past the COVID panic.

“I just think it’s time to move forward. The kids need to see faces, they need to see people smiling, they need to have a brighter outlook on the future in general,” he said.

Shawn added that his son, who isn’t even old enough to read, may have developmental issues and is unable to keep a mask on his face at all times. He said the boy doesn’t understand why he isn’t allowed to go to school.

“I’m watching my son … go to school, get turned away with tears in his eyes,” Shawn said. “He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s visibly upset … by getting turned away and rejected.”

Shawn’s attorney also said Theuerkauf Elementary broke the law because schools are only allowed to send children home for public health reasons if they are sick.

In the aftermath of the incident, the Mountain View Whisman School District seemingly tried to cover its tracks by making a sudden change to its masking policy.

At a school board meeting on Thursday night, officials suddenly decided that masks are optional.

The board sent out an email to schools to relay the “good news,” according to the group Reopen California Schools.

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Parents Choose Schools to Protect Their Rights. This Makes School Choice the Future of Education

Parents across the country are waking up to what’s taking place in our education system, and they’re not happy with what they’ve discovered.

“Icouldn’t trust these people with my kids.” When Nancy Anderson, M.D., said this about her child’s school in North Carolina, she was speaking for herself and her family. But she is far from alone.

In 2019, Anderson began reviewing her private Montessori school’s curriculum. What she found shocked her. Her elementary age children were being taught that America was founded on rape and murder. Her kids were instructed that the first Pilgrims were bigots filled with “hatred” and “greed.” The organizations that designed the curriculum contend that, in America, racism is “embedded in institutions and everyday life.”

“This was scary and caught me by surprise,” Nancy said.

Parents in North Carolina and around the country share Nancy’s sentiment. Other private schools, such as Sidwell Friends in Washington, D.C., (where former presidents have sent their children) also argue that America has “white-supremacist origins” and offer racial affinity groups where students can “explore their developing identities.”

These ideas are unpopular with American voters and parents. In 2020, a nationally representative survey commissioned by The Heritage Foundation found that 70 percent of parents say that slavery was a tragedy, but does not define America today.

What does define America? In 2021, an Associated Press/University of Chicago poll found that 85 percent of respondents say that “individual liberties and freedoms as defined by the Constitution” are important to our national identity.

Nancy left her private school for a different option. National associations of Montessori schools associate lessons soaked in identity politics under the umbrella of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI). Public school families are also signaling their dissatisfaction with curricula that fixate on DEI. DEI content, included in lessons in virtually every subject area, focuses on ethnic “identities” and radical instruction on sex. The former lessons harken back to the dark days of racial discrimination when students were treated differently based on skin color. The latter ideas force families to accept ideas about human biology that are unscientific and often leave minor children confused about their sex.

Whether due to DEI policies, draconian school rules during the pandemic, or for other reasons, assigned school enrollment dropped by 3 percent in fall 2020. That’s equivalent to the entire public school enrollment of Los Angeles and Chicago--combined.

What does this mean about the future of school choice?

Some claim that, when parents move their children to different schools, they are “destroying public education.” This is a common refrain from teacher unions and other education special interest groups.

In fact, though, the future of school choice will restore an authentic meaning to the words “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” When parents choose to homeschool (an increasingly popular option) or choose a private school, including religious schools, because assigned schools do not represent their values, they are preserving a diversity of ideas.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning school choice said that state lawmakers cannot exclude religious schools from programs that are publicly available because that would be discriminatory.

Activists have perverted equity to mean equal outcomes, regardless of personal behavior. Yet parent choice in education allows families to challenge their children or find them extra help—customizing the learning experience according to each child’s needs. Learning pods and microschools do this quite well. West Virginia lawmakers just adopted a policy specifically allowing families to create pods and microschools.

Finally, the future of school choice can only be forecast as inclusive. West Virginia policymakers adopted an education savings account proposal in 2021 that allows nearly every child in the state to apply for an account. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey just signed a similar expansive proposal, giving every Arizona child the same opportunity. Lawmakers in Iowa and Texas are on the verge of adopting similar policies. This is what inclusion should look like, not mandatory racial affinity groups or policies that allow only children of a certain color to use the playground at certain times.

Activists have corrupted and institutionalized the ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The future of school choice will not be defined by a radical acronym. It will offer a diversity of ideas, create equal opportunities, and include everyone—ideas all parents can trust for their children.

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School Choice Ensures Equality of Opportunity, Empowers Families, Experts Say

Government-assigned schools have fostered a system of resegregation, one in which students are divided “racially, socially, and economically,” says Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

Roberts contends that educational freedom is the foremost civil rights issue of the 21st century, because school choice ensures equality of opportunity, and that in turn improves public schools on every measure, he said.

“Because school choice increases transparency, it provides data in the market … that doesn’t exist now,” he said. “It breaks up the monopoly of government-funded schools.”

Roberts made his remarks at a panel discussion, “Empowering Families in Education” on Monday at Heritage, where he was joined by Tiffany Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, and Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children and executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute.

Trusting parents is central to school choice, Justice said. Schools must enable parents to make informed decisions for their children through transparent curriculums and the parent-teacher relationship, she explained.

In recent years, she said, it’s become clear that teachers unions represent “fringe, far left” interests. “What other industry would you pour money into and have the kinds of outcomes we’re having?” she said, likening it to continuing to pay a surgeon who consistently killed his patients.

The infiltration of leftist ideology in K-12 curriculums, without parents’ knowledge, is evil, Roberts said. “It’s evil because it’s dealing with our kids.”

DeAngelis noted that we should “thank teachers unions,” which he said have “inadvertently advanced the concept of school choice and homeschooling.”

Those unions lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to keep schools closed in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, he noted. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” turned into two years of “flattening a generation of children,” DeAngelis said, contending that self-serving teachers harmed students academically, mentally, and even physically.

Justice added that the radical gender ideology and critical race theory being taught in public schools were revealed during the pandemic. Parents were shocked to discover that their children were being taught such highly polarizing subjects, she said.

Ultimately, DeAngelis argued, those teachers “showed their true colors, and we’re all better off for it.”

Political winds are shifting, however, he continued. The governor of Arizona, for instance, signed into law an expansive school choice bill in July. Families who opt into the program receive over $6,500 per year, per child. They are free to choose their preferred schooling options—including private schools, homeschooling, and tutoring.

Roberts noted that the demographic groups most harmed by government-assigned schools also benefit the most from school choice, citing an experience he had as headmaster of the private John Paul the Great Academy Catholic high school in Lafayette, Louisiana.

A month after the school opted into then-Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s 2012 voucher program, a young black mother approached Roberts after school one day. She was able to send her son to the school because of the voucher program. That had changed the life of her seventh-grade son, her own life, and that of her family.

Freedom of education is the great equalizer, DeAngelis agreed. Nonwhite families are disproportionately more likely to use school voucher and tax credit programs, he said, adding that contrary to what critics say, that doesn’t entail a conflict between public and private schools. It’s about giving families a choice.

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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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