Monday, November 21, 2022



Teachers are Quitting Because of Unruly, Violent Students
Better pay is good, but no amount of compensation can lure a teacher into a combat zone


Bebe Nicholson

My niece always wanted to teach math. Since math teachers are in high demand, she didn’t have a problem landing a job. But now, after one year of teaching, she works as a church bookkeeper.

Why did she leave the school system when she had wanted to be a teacher for as long as she could remember?

Because students these days are unruly and violent, and teachers get no backing from school administrators or parents. Children are in charge of our schools, and if you don’t believe me, look at what happened in my niece’s case.

Her students were in the middle of taking a test when one of them stood up, test in hand, and headed out of the room.

My niece asked him where he was going.

“Out,” he mumbled. She told him he couldn’t take his test with him, and he protested. So she took his test, walked out, and returned with a plate of food a few minutes later. But he didn’t eat the food. He hurled it across the room at my niece, barely missing her.

Guess who got into trouble.

If you guessed the student, you’d be wrong. The teacher was the one who got into trouble. She was reprimanded for taking the student’s test away before he left the room.

She promptly quit her job.

I hear a lot of schoolteacher stories. My cousin, who taught high school, was in her classroom when gunshots rang out. She went into lockdown mode, securing the door and taping paper over the windows. It wasn’t until later that she discovered what had happened.

One of her former students had entered the school grounds with guns. He fired a shot, and luckily, his gun jammed. The principal and another school employee tackled him before he could pull the other pistol from his trench coat. No one at school was hurt, but they found out later that he had murdered his parents before heading to school.

My cousin retired the following year.

My husband, a teacher for 15 years, says classroom management was his biggest problem. Teachers weren’t allowed to suspend disruptive or violent students without filling out a mountain of paperwork justifying their decision. It took weeks for the paperwork to be approved.

Sometimes parents said their children had special conditions that caused them to be disruptive and the teachers needed to overlook it. Parents threatened lawsuits. If teachers tried to hold students accountable, there were endless parent/administrator/teacher meetings where teachers had to explain why they discriminated against the children.

One time my husband wasn’t told that one of his new students had been suspended a few weeks earlier for taking a gun to his previous school!

Now that he’s retired, my husband volunteers as a math tutor. He showed up at school yesterday only to discover that the student he was supposed to help had decided to leave school and go to the store. Why are students allowed to come and go whenever they want during school hours? This was never allowed when I was in school.

My 11th-grade granddaughter told me students fight at school all the time. She heads in the other direction when she sees a fight in progress.

You’ve probably heard the saying, “The inmates are running the asylum.” It appears these days that the students are running the schools.

Most politicians recommend increasing teacher pay as a primary solution to the problem of recruiting and retaining teachers. Better pay is good, but no amount of pay can lure a teacher into what has turned into a combat zone. Restoring a teacher’s authority to discipline students would be a good incentive to bring teachers back.

Schools have become too politicized. While well-intentioned, the No Child Left Behind Act has been a dismal failure, with its incentives to pass children at all costs acting as a detriment to real learning. Failing students is a black mark for a school, so administrators come down hard on teachers who don’t pass everyone.

In reading about solutions to the school discipline problem, I came across articles that emphasized how children needed space, they needed to be heard, they deserved to be understood, they needed authentic ways to validate their emotions, they needed to be re-centered for emotional stability, and they needed to know they belonged.

That’s all fine and good and should probably be addressed in a counselor’s office. We all want to be heard and have our emotions validated. But disruptive students don’t need coddling in the classroom.

They need accountability, to learn respect, and to be removed from the classroom when they are so disruptive that they interfere with another student’s opportunity to learn.

Why would we want to teach an entire generation of young people that they rule, that bad behavior has no consequences, and that disrespect and violence are acceptable?

I fear for the future of a country that nurtures and promotes immaturity and self-centeredness instead of accountability and accomplishment. Probably not many other countries allow student behavior in our schools.

We might be surprised that students thrive and excel with firmer boundaries and more discipline. Instead of having their fragile emotions injured from not “being heard,” they would develop a true sense of self-esteem from learning how to listen, be respectful, and master their lessons.

Instead of learning that hurling a plate of food at a teacher is okay, a student might decide he needs to stay in class and complete his test.

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Education Choice Supporters Win Big in 2022 Midterm Elections

Proponents of empowering parents with education choice should feel encouraged by the outcome of the midterm elections. States that went big on choice policies in the last two years overwhelmingly re-elected the policymakers who made it happen.

Opponents of education choice have long claimed that choice policies were politically unpopular. Despite polls showing high levels of public support, opponents like the teachers unions were better organized and well-funded. When they threatened politicians with electoral consequences for supporting choice policies, that was often sufficient to push fence-sitters into voting against empowering families with education choice.

But the lesson from the midterms for lawmakers inclined to support education choice is clear: Be not afraid!

In 2021, West Virginia enacted the Hope Scholarships, which are K-12 education savings accounts that families can use for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, online courses, special needs therapy, and more. The Hope Scholarships are available to all West Virginia students who are switching out of a public school or entering kindergarten, making it the most expansive education choice policy at the time it was enacted.

>>> Parents Lead the Nation on School Choice

The bill passed without the support of a single Democrat in either legislative chamber, while Republicans were overwhelmingly in favor. If opponents of education choice were right, then Republicans should have suffered at the ballot box in West Virginia. Instead, Republicans expanded their majorities in both chambers, gaining at least six seats in the state Senate and nine seats in the state House with five races still to be decided as of this writing.

Additionally, in primary races earlier this year, three of the 10 Republican defectors with contested primaries lost their races. Support for education choice is emerging as a litmus-test issue.

New Hampshire passed the second-most expansive education choice policy in 2021, with about one-third of K-12 students eligible for Education Freedom Accounts. Gov. Chris Sununu signed them into law and was handily re-elected for a fourth two-year term by a healthy margin (57% to 42%) in a year when Democrats won re-election in the U.S. Senate race and both congressional races.

Although votes are still being counted in the legislative races, the GOP is poised to maintain its control over both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature.

Several states also significantly expanded their existing education choice policies in 2021, including Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma. All four maintained Republican trifectas with most gaining legislative seats, while the three with gubernatorial races saw their Republican governors overwhelmingly re-elected.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made education choice a signature issue, signing legislation to expand eligibility for Florida’s choice policies to more than two-thirds of students and boasting that the Sunshine State is "leading the way in school choice." He’s right. The Heritage Foundation’s inaugural Education Freedom Report Card ranked Florida No. 1 overall and No. 3 for education choice. He won re-election by a margin of 59% to 40% and the GOP gained seats in both legislative chambers.

Support for education choice in Pennsylvania is more bipartisan than most states. In 2021, the Pennsylvania legislature adopted Senate Bill 381 to expand the Educational Improvement Tax Credit, which provides scholarships for students from low- and middle-income families. Though all six state senators in opposition were Democrats, so were about a dozen of the 41 senators voting in favor. Likewise, though all 47 votes against the bill in the state House came from Democrats, so did 43 of the 154 votes in favor. The bill was signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

>>> Arizona Parents Show How To Beat the Teachers’ Unions

Wolf’s successor, Gov.-elect Josh Shapiro, made waves earlier this year when he endorsed Lifeline Scholarships, a policy similar to the K-12 education savings accounts in 10 other states albeit limited to students assigned to low-performing public schools. Shapiro will be one of two Democratic governors openly supporting education choice along with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who won re-election this year after reversing his prior opposition to his state’s tax-credit scholarship policy.

In 2022, Arizona took the education choice crown back from West Virginia by expanding its education savings account policy to all children, making it the nation’s first truly universal choice policy. Now the families of all Arizona K-12 students are eligible to receive an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) worth about $7,000 to choose the learning environments that work best for their children. Since lawmakers expanded ESA eligibility, more than 25,000 students have signed up for an account.

Unlike in Pennsylvania, the vote in Arizona was along party lines. Although Arizona is still counting votes, the GOP appears poised to maintain its trifecta. Moreover, an attempt by choice opponents to refer the ESA expansion to the ballot failed to garner enough signatures due to the heroic grassroots efforts of families who support education choice.

As education choice becomes more widely available to more families, policymakers are waking up to the reality that it needn’t be a partisan issue. Rather, education choice is, rightly, now being viewed not as a Democrat versus Republican cause, but as parent-oriented versus special-interest oriented. And as the 2022 midterms have just demonstrated, those who sided with parents were on the winning side of their contests.

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UK: The lesson if you want to succeed in life? Act like a woman, leading headmistress says

Women have for decades been encouraged to 'lean in' to male working behaviour to get ahead – to speak louder, be more assertive and revel in competition.

But a leading headmistress believes the opposite is the key to success, saying everyone should act and work like a woman.

In a speech today, Heather Hanbury, president of the Girls' Schools Association (GSA), will hail the benefits of traditionally feminine and 'soft power' traits such as empathy, creativity and collaboration.

Mrs Hanbury, who is also head of the Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, west London, will tell the GSA's annual conference that it is the job of schools to instil these traits in all pupils, regardless of their sex.

'It's absolutely time to finally acknowledge working like girls and women is a great way to work and live,' she will say. 'I've had enough of being told otherwise. No one should feel they have to 'be like a man' to succeed in life.'

Addressing more than 150 head teachers, Mrs Hanbury will argue that girls' schools are 'incubators of new and better ways of thinking and being'.

She will add: 'This influence isn't just about girls and young women but about the huge value that young women offer and create in the world through the way that they work and spend their time in it.'

She believes traditionally male qualities often 'end up in burnout'. Her comments come after a major study found men's greater self-esteem helps them to succeed in the workplace.

The study by Dr Nikki Shure and Dr Anna Adamecz-Volgyi of UCL followed 17,000 people born in the UK in a specific week in 1970 throughout their lives.

It showed over-confidence was a big reason why more of the men ended up in top roles than women.

Separately, a recent report by Cranfield University and EY found 91 per cent of the 413 women on FTSE 100 boards are in advisory non-executive director roles, with just nine chief executives.

It led to accusations that top firms have made an 'appalling' lack of progress in promoting women to executive roles, instead putting them in 'box-ticking' positions to boost equality figures.

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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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