I remember how it was -- JR
‘I Had No Power Over My Kids’ Education,’ Maryland Mom Says After Asking to Opt Her Second Grader Out of LGBT Lessons
An elementary school just outside the nation’s capital touted Gay Pride Month and defined words such as “transgender” in a video sent to students. A middle school in the same school system displays pride flags and “LGBTQ+ stories” in class.
A local mom, who wishes to remain anonymous but whom The Daily Signal will refer to as Rebecca Martin, said her two children were in second and fifth grade at Kensington Parkwood Elementary School in suburban Maryland when the school distributed a video marking Pride Month on June 4, 2021.
“I could not believe what I was seeing. I was just in absolute shock,” Martin said.
Martin also witnessed rainbow-striped pride flags on display in her son’s classrooms at North Bethesda Middle School on back-to-school night last fall, after he was enrolled there, she told The Daily Signal.
The lone bulletin board in one classroom was given over to what decorative letters described as “LGBTQ stories,” she said.
Both schools attended by Martin’s children are part of Maryland’s highly rated Montgomery County Public Schools.
At the time it sent out a video celebrating Pride Month, Martin said, Kensington Parkwood Elementary used a hybrid learning model because of the COVID-19 pandemic: Students attended class in person some weeks and remotely during other weeks.
Her fifth grade son was taking classes from home the day the elementary school sent out a weekly video hosted by media specialist Esther Girón.
In the video, Girón tells students that “we’re celebrating Pride Month for LGBTQ+ people.”
She goes on to share some “fun facts” about Pride Month, including feeling-based definitions for a list of words such as gender, transgender, pride, gay, and lesbian.
Girón also highlights two LGBT activists: the late San Francisco elected official Harvey Milk, described as “one of the first openly gay politicians in the United States,” and Laverne Cox, the transgender actor in the adult Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black.”
Girón didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s emailed request for comment.
“I was in shock, and I was also frustrated and … angered,” Martin told The Daily Signal.
The terminology used in the video for the elementary school’s students wasn’t correct, she added. “They were confusing gender and biology.”
Martin said she especially was disturbed that her second grade daughter, as well as other kids as young as kindergarten age, were exposed to this content.
Martin said her children are the third generation in the family to be enrolled in Montgomery County Public Schools, which is among the most affluent school districts in the nation.
“Never, never … was anything remotely like this taught,” she recalled. “And if it was, you had to get parental permission.”
Martin said she sent an email to Kensington Parkwood’s principal and vice principal the day she saw the video on the school’s KPTV channel.
She requested to opt her children out of future attempts to push what she saw as age-inappropriate material on her kids without her consent, Martin said. But she never got a response from the school.
“I don’t feel, as a parent, this is appropriate for my child,” Martin told The Daily Signal. “I felt … I had no power over my own kids’ education.”
Kensington Parkwood Elementary didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment by The Daily Signal by publication time.
This past year, Martin said, she attended back-to-school night at North Bethesda Middle School, where her son now is enrolled.
A rainbow or transgender flag was on display in each of her son’s seven classes, she told The Daily Signal. Such “pride flags” hung on the same poles as American flags at the school.
In one classroom at Bethesda Middle School, Martin said, the single bulletin board on the walls featured what were called “LGBTQ stories.”
The principal of North Bethesda Middle School, AnneMarie Kestner Smith, described her school’s LGBTQ-related policies in an email to The Daily Signal.
“These are not topics in middle school curriculum but is [sic] something students are aware of,” Smith wrote, adding:
MPCS [Montgomery County Public Schools] takes pride in the level of support for both students and staff that identify in the LGBTQIA+ community. We have welcoming, affirming schools, classrooms, teams, and clubs. We value all of our children, youth, teachers, staff, and parents.
In June, Smith emailed students and parents to alert them to an incident during eighth grade lunch that she described as hateful toward the school’s “LGBTQ+ community.”
The principal wrote:
I was disappointed and dismayed to learn that during 8th grade lunch on the first day of PRIDE month some students displayed hateful and threatening behaviors towards members of and allies of our LGBTQ+ community. This type of behavior, along with any hateful, racist, or bullying behavior is not acceptable at North Bethesda Middle School.
The 8th grade administrator, counselor, and team leader created a safe space for students impacted by this event during lunch today and continue to be available to support.
Smith added that she and other school administrators would investigate and “address the behavior with appropriate consequences.”
It isn’t clear what the hateful behavior was, Martin told The Daily Signal. And what constitutes “hateful” for the principal isn’t necessarily what many parents would consider hateful, she said.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/10/20/public-schools-in-dc-suburb-tout-pride-month-lgbtq-stories/
*******************************************************Father Blasts Woke School Board, Starts Speech with Verse Straight from Bible and One Question
A conservative activst, pastor and father in North Carolina is going viral after torching a woke school board’s equity initiative during a meeting earlier this month.
During his remarks before the Wake County School Board, John Amanchukwu slammed officials for worrying about a diversity office when achievement numbers for black students in core subjects were abysmal.
“We’re wasting taxpayer dollars putting money toward this diversity office that’s not benefiting those who need it the most,” he said.
However, it was the Bible verse he started his speech off with, Luke 17:2, which ought to provide parents a roadmap on how to shame liberal school boards.
The verse, which was paraphrased by Amanchukwu: “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.”
“And so the question today to the school board is only you know whether or not your role — the policies, the curriculum and the things that you allow in this school system in Wake County — only you know whether or not a millstone is tied around your neck,” said Amanchukwu, who has campaigned against initiatives like critical race theory.
“God is going to judge every last one of you for decisions that are made on behalf of black children,” he continued.
“This past year, we spent one million dollars on a diversity office. And how did that benefit black children? How did it benefit children in general? Well, 78 percent of 3rd through 8th grade black students are not proficient in math in Wake County.”
He noted this meant that “we’re wasting taxpayer dollars putting money toward this diversity office that’s not benefiting those who need it the most.”
“If they’re not reading on grade level, they’re not performing mathematically, then they’re not going to be able to get jobs in the fields like STEM, but we’re wasting money on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office while we are failing black students in the name of diversity,” he added.
“As we talk about inclusion and making sure that the trans student feels comfortable and the queer student feels comfortable, what does that have to do with reading, writing and arithmetic?” Amanchukwu continued.
“As we are teaching cultural Marxism and grooming children to be the next pervert, we are damaging our kids in this public school system, and it needs to stop.”
He also urged for school choice for those who public education was failing: “In the Jim Crow era, Black students were locked out of the public school system, but today they are trapped in.”
Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier brought the clip to wider attention, tweeting it on Wednesday.
“This pastor in NC nailed it while giving this speech to the woke Wake County school board,” he said. “God Bless this guy!”
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Australia’s dumbed-down schools are going nowhere
Over the last month, there have been yet another two initiatives designed, supposedly, to improve the performance of Australian schools, raise standards and ensure greater equity. The first is an interim report by the Productivity Commission evaluating the 2018 National School Reform Agreement.
The NSRA is signed by Commonwealth, state, and territory governments and details strategies designed to ‘lift student outcomes across Australian schools’ by implementing a range of policies including a unique student identifier, reviewing senior secondary pathways, and strengthening the initial teacher education accreditation system.
The second initiative involves establishing a panel to review the effectiveness of teacher training established by the Commonwealth Minister for Education Jason Clare and chaired by the ex-ABC Managing Director Mark Scott.
While applauded as the panacea to achieve excellence and equity both initiatives are destined to join a long list of reviews and reports beginning in the early 1970s that have proven counterproductive and worthless in strengthening Australia’s education system.
Since the Karmel Report in 1973 and Victoria’s Blackburn Report in 1985, there have been over 20 reviews and reports at all levels of government designed to strengthen schools, improve teacher effectiveness, and raise standards.
Among the plethora commissioned are the Keating government’s National Statements and Profiles (1992), the NSW’s review of the Higher School Certificate (1995), a national inquiry into literacy teaching (2005), the Gonski Review of School funding (2011), the Review of the National Curriculum (2014), the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence (2017), and a review of the NSW curriculum (2020).
In addition to the eight state and territory education departments and curriculum bodies, in yet another attempt to improve Australia’s substandard educational performance, the Commonwealth government has also established the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (2005) and the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (2008).
The dismal results of the last 50 years of reviews, reports, and government policies are obvious to all. Australia has slipped down the rankings as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS) tests.
Apprentices start work with substandard literacy and numeracy skills, universities have dumbed-down first-year courses, and too many students leave after 12 years of schooling culturally illiterate and morally adrift.
If those responsible for Australia’s education system were in charge of a business they would have been sacked or gone broke. Instead, like the old industrial relations club, those responsible for the current malaise are reappointed to peak positions and given yet another chance to prove their ineptitude
What’s to be done? While the Greens Party, the Australian Education Union, and sympathetic academics argue what is needed in increased investment over the last 20 to 30 years proves spending more is simply throwing good money after bad.
It’s also useless to establish yet another committee made up of bureaucrats and education department, teacher union, and subject association representatives who have minimal, if any, experience as practising teachers.
Until there are significant structural changes schools will continue to underperform, students will continue to suffer, and the nation’s cultural capital and productivity rates will continue to decline.
The first step is to realise there is no magic bullet and one-off reviews and reports focusing on a single issue like the curriculum, teacher training, how teachers are rewarded, and classroom pedagogy will achieve nothing.
What determines school effectiveness and student achievement depends on a number of complex, interrelated factors that have to be addressed as a whole and at the same time.
Secondly, schools need to be freed from provider capture and what Michael Gove did when the British Secretary of State for Education derided as the ‘blog’. Schools need greater autonomy and flexibility and less bureaucratic red tape and interference from on high.
The curriculum is overcrowded while the superficial and criteria-based diagnostic assessment and reporting regime forces teachers to spend weeks writing voluminous descriptive reports. This is ineffective and takes energy away from teaching.
It should not surprise, proven by research by Australia’s Gary Marks and overseas academics including Ludger Woessmann and Eric Hanushek, giving schools greater autonomy and flexibility allows non-government schools to outperform government schools.
The cutting edge of reform overseas involves charter schools in America, city academies and free schools in England plus charter schools in India. Such is their popularity in disadvantaged communities, enrolments are oversubscribed.
For far too long Australia’s education system has fallen victim to progressive, new-age fads including open classrooms, process and inquiry-based learning, student agency, teachers as facilitators, and a curriculum driven by neo-Marxist inspired Woke ideology.
Schools have also been infected with the soft bigotry of low expectations where disadvantaged students are expected to always underperform. It’s time to stop experimenting with unproven fads and ensure all schools embrace rigorous standards and high expectations.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/australias-dumbed-down-schools-are-going-nowhere/
***********************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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