I remember how it was -- JR
Idled NYC educators do nothing but sign in remotely, even from Europe
Scores of New York City educators removed from public schools and put in “rubber rooms” — the infamous spaces where those under investigation or awaiting disciplinary trials are held — have been sent home to report remotely, The Post has learned.
The suspended staffers, while fully paid, are required to do nothing but sign in and out by email and “stay in the NYC area.”
Most comply with the rule, but a few defiantly jetted to Germany and the West Indies, a high school teacher awaiting a disciplinary hearing told The Post.
“No one knows where you are. You could be in Alaska or Hawaii on a vacation – they don’t know,” the teacher said. “You can sign in at 8 am, roll over and go back to sleep,” she added.
The tenured educators can run errands, go shopping, or meet friends for lunch while on the city payroll.
“None of the teachers I know jeopardize their jobs by traveling long distances,” said Betsy Combier, a paralegal who writes the “NYC Rubber Room Reporter” blog.
At least 200 suspended staffers are currently stationed at home, Combier estimates.
With base teacher salaries ranging from $61,070 to $128,657 a year, the taxpayer cost for these stay-at-home educators could range from $12 million to $25 million.
“What a massive waste of money. They’re sitting in ‘rubber homes’ doing nothing,” Combier said.
The exiled educators included 92 DOE staffers, including teachers and assistant principals accused last year of submitting fake COVID-19 vaccine cards. But a Brooklyn judge on Dec. 30 ordered the DOE to return staffers who sued to their former jobs until they get hearings. The DOE is in the process of sending them back. A criminal investigation is ongoing.
The DOE’s rubber room move reflects another shift in the notorious holding pens.
Ex-Mayor Bloomberg agreed in 2010 to close several massive “reassignment centers” where at least 600 teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence did nothing but read, nap, knit, and kibitz. One Queens teacher ran a lucrative real-estate business on the side. Some not terminated after sexual misconduct are permanently sidelined
Since then, the DOE has scattered smaller rubber rooms across the city.
Rubber roomers stayed home during the COVID shutdown, but returned to buildings in September 2021.
Two days before the start of this school year on Sept. 6, the DOE sent an email saying they would be “temporarily reporting remotely.” No reason was given, but one teacher was told “no central office space is available.”
“As you must be able to report in person when directed, you are required to be in the NYC area on scheduled days of work.” the missive states. “Any work assigned to you will be provided through your DOE email.”
Three teachers told The Post the DOE hasn’t told them to report in person since or given them any work – and barred them from remote workshops or training sessions.
“All I do is sign in at 8 am and sign out at 2:50 pm. No assignments, no nothing,” said another high-school teacher awaiting a decision in his administrative trial after five years as a rubber roomer. He’s fighting charges he made inappropriate comments to a female student.
Last year, the teacher went to a Queens office building where all he did was distribute mail and sometimes Xerox papers while collecting his nearly $136,000 salary. “I’m happy to go home. I didn’t want to be in that building and have to do the mail,” he said.
Another veteran teacher was accused of making an insensitive comment to a student spent last year in a DOE basement on Rockaway Boulevard with up to 15 other rubber roomers.
“Absolutely no work,” he said. “We chatted. We played board games. We did whatever we could not to kill each other.”
https://nypost.com/2023/01/14/idled-nyc-educators-do-nothing-but-sign-in-remotely-even-from-europe/
**********************************************‘Shameful Form of Indoctrination’: SPLC Promotes Teaching Kids About Black Lives Matter on MLK Day—in First Grade
The Southern Poverty Law Center‘s education arm, Learning for Justice, promoted a former teacher’s article about using Martin Luther King Jr. Day to teach first graders about the Black Lives Matter movement and the “need for continued protest and action in the face of ongoing systemic injustice.”
Critics slammed the lesson as “child abuse” and a “shameful form of indoctrination.”
Learning for Justice shared the January 2018 article, “From MLK to #BlackLivesMatter: A Throughline for Young Students,” on Twitter on Wednesday. In the article, Bret Turner (then a first grade teacher at Head-Royce School in Oakland, California) wrote that Martin Luther King Jr. Day represents “a great opportunity” to connect King’s work with “the work of today’s civil rights activists.”
“First-graders are excited to study through a lens of fairness; it is largely what drives them in their daily interactions,” Turner wrote. “If they can understand why Dr. King marched, then they can certainly wrap their minds around the need for continued protest and action in the face of ongoing systemic injustice.”
Turner emphasized the word “continued” by placing it in italics.
Turner recalled in the article: “Last year around MLK Day, we compared the guiding principles of Black Lives Matter to our school’s mission and, even closer to home, our classroom charter. We found much in common, particularly BLM’s focus on diversity, empathy and loving engagement, and its overt ties to feminism and gender identity issues.”
The first-grade teacher added that his young students are “capable of understanding why BLM is necessary through a historical lens.”
He recounted: “In my class, we’ve made our own BLM posters, explored the Oakland roots of BLM co-founder Alicia Garza, read relevant children’s literature, and observed and discussed the related work being done by our middle and high schoolers and the Black Student Union.”
Turner didn’t mention Patrice Cullors, another founder of Black Lives Matter, who infamously cashed in on activism opposing “systemic racism.”
He recalled a student’s response to a leading question:
To the guiding question ‘Why is a movement still needed today?’ one child flatly answered: ‘Because people with black and brown skin are still treated badly.’ Another remarked that ‘things are better now, but we’ve only ever had one black president and now he’s gone.’
Turner’s article quoted questions from other students, including, “Why do the police hurt Black people?” “Why is skin color so important?” and “Who decided that white people matter more than other people?”
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a federal holiday celebrating the slain civil rights leader, falls on the third Monday of January, Jan. 16 this year.
Carol Swain, a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University and the author of books on race in America, called this lesson a “shameful form of indoctrination.”
“My impression is that a 6-year-old is not prepared to understand anything about ‘systemic injustice’ or systemic racism,” Swain, who is black and holds a doctorate, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Thursday.
She added that exposing young children “to controversial materials or agendas, adult agendas, it robs them of their childhood. It’s a shameful form of indoctrination of children who are too young to process the materials and information being presented to them.”
Swain also noted that the lesson would affect children differently based on the color of their skin.
“Black children will start interpreting every experience they have through the lens of racism,” she predicted. “For white children, I think that it will cause them to be embarrassed, to be ashamed, and to have feelings of guilt.”
The former professor also argued that “teaching Black Lives Matter in the same context with Dr. King is confusing” because “the parts of Dr. King that we mostly focus on have to do with the fact that he wanted to bring people together, dreaming of a time when we would get beyond race.”
Meanwhile, she argued, “Black Lives Matter is all about race,” and the movement “is rooted in Marxism, in conflict theory.” (BLM co-founder Garza has described herself as a Marxist.)
“Why would anybody teach something that is rooted in conflict theory to first graders?” Swain asked.
Chloe Carmichael, a clinical psychologist and political independent with a Ph.D., told The Daily Signal that first graders “probably wouldn’t have the critical thinking skills or knowledge of our social systems to consider this issue in a meaningful way beyond simply agreeing with their teacher. That’s why some people regard it as indoctrination.”
“One problem is that a leading question, ‘Why is a movement still needed today?’ is used, rather than, ‘is a movement still needed today?'” Carmichael argued. “The phrasing of the question would be very non-inclusive of students who believed that the host of civil rights and affirmative action laws we have today are adequate to navigate cases of injustice; this is especially relevant because those laws were the hard-won fruit of the work done by MLK and the other early protesters.”
Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, told The Daily Signal: “What Learning for Justice does on a routine basis is to promote hatred—which is ironic, since fighting hatred is ostensibly the SPLC’s main job, except we all know it’s the opposite.” (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
“BLM is not a struggle for civil rights or for social justice,” Gonzalez noted. “It hides behind these slogans to promote anti-capitalism (read socialism), the destruction of the family unit, and the abolition of our legal system. What would follow from that is chaos, which is the goal of BLM after all, since it seeks ‘systemic’ transformation as all Marxists have done since Marx himself. To manipulate young minors in this manner is child abuse.”
The SPLC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
The Head-Royce School would not comment on Turner’s class or whether the school still teaches Black Lives Matter to first graders on MLK Day, but a spokeswoman expressed the school’s commitment to diversity and fairness.
“The Head-Royce School’s mission is rooted in core values of scholarship, diversity and citizenship,” Sarah Holliman, the spokeswoman, told The Daily Signal in an email. “We care deeply about the academic preparation and social-emotional well-being of our students and teach them to be curious and responsible citizens. Our teachers are passionate educators who help students build a strong academic foundation and help them understand concepts such as fairness and belonging through developmentally appropriate content, lessons and exercises.”
My book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center” lays out the history of the SPLC and how its program to monitor the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, Klanwatch, morphed into Hatewatch, a project that brands mainstream conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.
In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in the nation’s capital, entering the lobby with a semiautomatic pistol and then shooting and wounding a guard. The man told the FBI that he found the conservative organization on the SPLC’s “hate map” and intended to kill everyone in the building. The man later pleaded guilty to committing an act of terror and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on the “hate map” ever since.
After the SPLC fired its cofounder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019, a former staffer claimed that the SPLC’s accusations of “hate” are a “cynical fundraising scam” aimed at “bilking northern liberals.”
The SPLC launched its education program, Teaching Tolerance, in 1991. In 2020, the Teaching Tolerance website claimed that “our community includes more than 500,000 educators who read our magazine, screen our films, visit our website, participate in Mix It Up at Lunch Day, use our curriculum or participate in our social media community.”
The education project was rebranded as “Learning for Justice” in February 2021, and the website no longer mentions how many educators read the magazine or engage with the content.
Among other things, Learning for Justice has published a learning plan on critical race theory for grades 6 to 8. The theory encourages students to deconstruct modern American society on the premise that its institutions are “systematically racist,” despite the efforts of King and others that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and legal prohibitions against racial discrimination.
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Australia: Are private school fees worth it?
The discussion below is fairly reasonable but omits a lot and is too generalized.
What it omits are the SOCIAL as distinct from the educational advantages of a private schooling. Pupils tend to form lasting friendships from their school days and the friends from private school are often VERY advantageous.
And while private schooling may not greatly help every pupil it can be very advantageous as an escape hatch from a bad government school. The latter point is mentioned but needs emphasis
The experience of overseas travel, a new family car or 12 months’ tuition at a top Sydney school?
Private school fees breaking through the $45,000 a year barrier, as reported by this masthead last week, will leave some parents weighing up what is the tangible value of an elite education if it means trade-offs in other areas.
University of New England lecturer in education Sally Larsen said the difference in academic performance of students at public and private schools was negligible.
“There’s no difference in primary school, and it’s just a segregation effect in high school, where kids from more wealthy families are being funnelled into private schools,” she said.
Glenn Fahey, director of the education program at the Centre for Independent Studies, said there was little overall value added from a non-government education once students’ backgrounds, including socioeconomic status, were accounted for.
“What the data tells us is that students’ backgrounds, largely parental education and employment status, make a big difference,” he said.
But Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research associate professor Greg Marks said there were some tangible benefits in terms of ATAR scores for students who attend a private school.
“There is an incremental benefit, beyond that of socioeconomic status, of going to a private school, to an independent school, followed by Catholic schools, followed by government schools,” he said. “Top ATAR students often come from private schools, and they tend to get into university more, which makes a big difference to employment and lifetime income.”
Marks’ research in Victoria found that students who went to a private school achieved an ATAR rank five or six points higher than those who went to a public school.
He attributed this discrepancy to standards of teaching, discipline and a subculture of strong academic performance.
“I think in private schools, they teach at a higher standard and pitch the lessons at a higher standard so that kids are expected to reach them and therefore do,” he said. “There’s probably more of a subculture of doing well at school, and if kids are causing problems, they can get expelled.”
Marks said while the data was sparse, private school students tended to experience less unemployment, earn higher incomes and hold higher status jobs. But he also said it largely stemmed from the benefits of getting a university degree, and that paying a premium for a private school education would not benefit students of different abilities in the same way.
“Ability is quite stable, so if your kid is a top performer or isn’t going to do very well, sending them to a private school won’t make much of a difference and probably will not be worth $45,000,” he said. “For kids in the middle to top of the class, it might give them a bit of a boost to their ATAR to go to a private or selective school, which would make a difference getting into a prestigious course at university.”
While there are some international studies that show private schools can also benefit students in terms of a “peer effect”, Larsen said that impact was probably “smaller than people think,” and that the cost of private school wasn’t worth its benefits.
“The school sector that kids go into is one factor among many that help to explain where they get academically and socially,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think the benefits justify the costs.”
Marks said that eschewing a private school education and investing the money elsewhere could be better for some people, but rejected the idea of spending it on things such as overseas trips.
“There’s a reasonable argument to put the money that you would have used in the bank and get a return on that,” he said. “But taking them on trips overseas to give them ‘life training’ doesn’t make sense.”
In a Centre for Independent Studies survey of more than 1000 parents, those who chose a government school were more likely to indicate that they would have made a different choice (43 per cent) if it weren’t for the cost than parents who chose a Catholic school (30 per cent).
Redfern resident Maria Vlezko saw an immediate improvement when she moved her daughter from a public school to the International Grammar School in Glebe two years ago.
“I was highly dissatisfied with her old school,” she said. “Kids weren’t receiving as much attention in class, they got teased by other children if they did well and my daughter became very uninterested in school.”
Vlezko said the extracurricular offerings and multicultural component of Anastasia’s school were important factors in her decision to move towards private schooling.
“There’s music, drama, chess, coding, and there are kids from lots of different backgrounds, which aligns with my values and how I want my kids to grow up,” she said. “It’s an investment in our children’s future, and we only have one chance.”
Despite cost of living pressures, Vlezko said the fees of nearly $30,000 a year were worth it for 11-year-old Anastasia.
“There was massive progress straight away,” she said. “Teachers were easy to reach, they identified Anastasia’s strengths and areas for improvement straight away, and she made lots of friends with the same interests who help each other with lessons. It’s worth the sacrifice for us.”
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/are-private-school-fees-worth-it-20230111-p5cbuc.html
***********************************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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