I remember how it was -- JR
Award for pro-mask, pro-lockdown?! NYC teacher
Bashing the parents of the students you teach, especially those who fought to get kids back into your classroom and freed from irrational and harmful totems like face masks, is apparently a good career move for some New York City schoolteachers — and profitable, too.
Bobson Wong, a 17-year veteran math teacher, was just awarded $20,000 and the MfA Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education for “influencing the teaching profession in exceptional ways” and his “ability to have a positive impact within [his] school community and drive change outside of [his] own classroom.”
On Twitter, meanwhile, Wong regularly and publicly shares his disdain for the parents of his students who advocated opening schools — in Marxist, classist language.
“When I see the ‘keep schools open’ screaming about ending mask mandates from the comfort of their home offices in their posh neighborhoods unaffected by COVID, I shake my head. Centering your convenience at the expense of everyone is the embodiment of privilege.”
Wong might want to seek out an English teacher for a refresher class in irony. No single profession had their “convenience centered” more than unionized public-school teachers who fought to keep them “working” from home and made sure they were first in line for vaccines (and did not have to return to work after being vaccinated!).
The teachers union also successfully fought off the reasonable request to livestream class lessons when up to two-thirds of students were at home because of New York City’s insane union-driven cohorting system, which did nothing to lower transmission of COVID and did so much to deny so many public-school children stranded at home days, weeks and months of in-person school.
Teachers, ER doctors, EMTs, firefighters, cops, corrections officers and MTA bus drivers and subway conductors who worked through the pandemic could help explain to Wong what “centering your convenience” and “privilege” actually look like.
So could the parents, mostly moms, who left the workforce and had careers end or stall so they could do the jobs that teachers were still being paid to do — you know, teach kids. Wong has an impressive pedigree: He’s a Bronx Science graduate with a BA from Princeton and two master’s degrees. He may well be a great math teacher.
But one wonders: Wouldn’t all those degrees and nearly two decades of teaching math imbue some basic numeracy? New York’s extended school closures and lockdowns did nothing to slow or stop the COVID transmission that ravaged our city in spring 2020. In the end, New York state fared worse than Florida, our polar opposite when it comes to pandemic policy, in terms of mortality rates.
New York’s self-inflicted economic damage, youth mental-health crisis and devastating learning loss are what we open-school parents were trying to prevent. And we were right to do so, Mr. Wong. We were also brave, stubborn, resilient and, eventually, immune to the lame and ridiculous accusation of privilege tossed around by you and so many others.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/award-for-pro-mask-pro-lockdown-nyc-teacher-has-a-lot-to-learn/
**********************************************************South Dakota epitomizes the rapid growth of homeschooling in America
Guided by the principle that parents, not the government, have the right to determine what and how their kids are taught, homeschooling families have overturned existing rules and batted down attempts over the last decade to impose new ones in many states, including South Dakota.
What’s left in much of the United States today is essentially an honor system in which parents are expected to do a good job without much input or oversight. The rollback of regulations, coupled with the ill effects of remote learning during the pandemic, have boosted the number of families opting out of public schools in favor of educating their kids at home.
Reflecting a national trend, the number of children homeschooled in South Dakota rose more than 20% in both of the last two school years.
Homeschoolers in the Mount Rushmore state advocated for a new law that strips away key pieces of the state’s oversight and eases the way for parents leave public schools. Last year Senate Bill 177 ended the requirement that parents provide annual notice to a district of their intent to homeschool their child. More significantly, homeschool students no longer must take standardized tests, as public schoolers do, or face possible intervention by the school board if they fail.
“It was a big win for parental rights,” says Dan Beasley, then a staff attorney at the influential Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which helped craft and pass the legislation. “It cut out unnecessary regulation and streamlined the process so parents can invest their time in providing the best education they can for their children.”
This freedom stands in contrast to outraged parents who feel powerless over how their kids are taught in public schools. In high-pitched battles at school board meetings, some take aim at the easing of admissions standards, others at what they see as the promotion of critical race theory and transgender rights, and still others at segregated classrooms and the presence of police officers on campus. And almost everyone is concerned with the sharp decline in already low reading and math scores of students in nearly every state during the pandemic, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress released in late October.
For a growing number of parents, homeschooling is the answer to the institutional barriers to the education they believe in. Beyond requirements that homeschooling parents teach a few core subjects like math and English, they are free to pick the content.
American history, for example, can be all about the glory of the Founding Fathers and the prosperity of free markets, or the oppression of Native Americans and people of color and the struggle for equality. For many homeschoolers, history is taught through a Christian lens, while others follow a standard public school curriculum.
The push to deregulate homeschooling raises difficult questions about how to balance the rights of parents to educate children as they see fit with the responsibility of the state to provide educational opportunity – and protect kids when things go wrong. While U.S. courts have stood behind parental rights, with the caveat that states have the authority to impose reasonable regulations to ensure students are educated, European countries lean the other way. To safeguard children, they have imposed much more stringent oversight of home schools.
Cases of child abuse and academic neglect in home schools are a real concern, especially as the guardrails are removed. Most cases of mistreatment are discovered and reported by teachers in public schools, a protection that doesn’t help homeschooled children. Homeschool alumni at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) and academic researchers have documented hundreds of examples of harm to children, many leading to criminal charges, ranging from fatalities and sexual abuse to poor instruction from parents who can’t or don’t teach.
But calls by CRHE and others for more protections don’t get much traction in the United States. In March, after Maryland lawmaker Sheila Ruth introduced a bill to create a homeschool advisory council to collect information from homeschooling parents and advise state officials, she was inundated with calls and emails. A few were so nasty and threatening that her office called the police. In a Facebook post, Ruth promised the homeschool advocates that she would let the bill die and pleaded with them to stand down.
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DC Council ‘Beginning to Recognize Irrationality’ of Kicking Kids Out of School Over Vaccine Mandate
The District of Columbia Council voted Tuesday to push the city’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students ages 12 and older to next year. The district currently mandates that eligible students must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Jan. 3, or else be barred from attending school.
D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson, an independent, joined by Chairman Phil Mendelson, a Democrat, introduced emergency legislation to delay the mandate and the council passed it.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who sponsored a bill in September to combat D.C.’s “racist COVID-19 vaccine mandate in schools,” told The Daily Signal on Tuesday:
Even as the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] continues to unscientifically push the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students, the D.C. Council is beginning to recognize the impossibility and irrationality of throwing thousands of children out of school if they choose not to take the COVID vaccine. We’ve known for a long time now that children face much less risk from COVID-19. It’s time for the D.C. Council to give parents assurance, stop threatening their children’s education, and repeal this racist vaccine mandate once and for all.
“We need more time and understanding,” Henderson told The Washington Post. “So that is why, when [Mendelson] and I discussed it, that is why we thought first doing a delay until school year 23-24 was appropriate, and then for us in the new council period to have a fuller conversation around what happens next.”
“The district is one of three jurisdictions in the country that requires COVID vaccine for public school students,” Mendelson, the D.C. Council chair, said at a Monday legislative briefing. He explained that he and Henderson crafted a COVID-19 emergency policy, which would push off the deadline for students to receive the vaccine in order to attend school.
The Office of State Superintendent of Education reported in September that 45% of D.C. students are not in compliance with the district’s COVID-19 vaccination policy, as of Sept. 27. This policy defines full COVID-19 immunization as both an initial vaccine as well as any additional boosters incorporated into public health standards.
Yet, a mere 6.5% of D.C. residents have received the new COVID-19 booster.
In August, Mayor Muriel Bowser told The Daily Signal there would be no virtual learning options for unvaccinated students. The Daily Signal reported that and the fact that over 40% of black students in the District aged 12 and older were not vaccinated at the time. After The Daily Signal’s report, the city abruptly changed the enforcement deadline for the COVID-19 vaccination, moving it to 2023.
Doug Badger, health and welfare policy scholar at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal, Heritage’s news outlet:
The D.C. government is finally responding to reality: Turning children away from school because they haven’t received the COVID vaccine is infeasible. Most parents understand that the risk of COVID to their children is low and that the vaccines don’t prevent their kids from getting or transmitting the disease. Having closed the schools for too long, it would be unconscionable to turn away students now that they have reopened.
Moreover, over a quarter of D.C. public school students are not up to par with the district’s routine pediatric immunization schedule, which applies to grades as young as pre-kindergarten.
D.C. public schools extended the deadline for pre-K through fifth grade students to Oct. 11 at the beginning of this school year. The deadline for middle and high school students to receive their routine immunizations is scheduled for Nov. 4.
Mendelson noted there has been confusion surrounding the district’s vaccination policies, “in part because the law that we adopted last year requires the vaccine when the student is eligible” for full Food and Drug Administration approval. “Much approval has been emergency authorization, which is not what the law contemplates.”
Though D.C. Council members extended the COVID-19 vaccine deadline for students, Mendelson noted that the routine immunization requirements still apply to pre-K through 12th grade students.
Lindsey Burke, director of education policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal:
Over the course of the pandemic, D.C. fourth graders lost 12 points in math and 8 points in reading on the recently released National Assessment of Education Progress. Those dramatic declines are the equivalent of over a year’s worth of learning loss in math.
Those problems compound over time. Just 16% of eighth graders in D.C. are proficient in math and just 23% are proficient in reading.
The last thing these children need is to be denied entry to school because of politicized, teachers union-supported policies. As D.C. is under its jurisdiction, Congress should immediately allow every single child denied entry into school because of this policy to receive a voucher to attend a private school in Virginia or Maryland.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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