Boy, 12, says he was kicked out of Massachusetts school for wearing shirt that said 'there are only two genders' - because staff said it made pupils feel 'unsafe'

Perish the thought that they one day encounter a real threat to their safety. They are being totally misled about what is safe or unsafe. The school should certainly be warning students about unsafe things -- but only when they are really unsafe. The students could end up missing real threats

I quite admire the student below. I would be proud if he were my kid. He had some very good questions

A Massachusetts middle school student has claimed he was kicked out of school for wearing a t-shirt with words stating that there are only two genders.

Liam Morrison, 12, told the Middleborough School Council on April 13 how his father had to pick him up from John T. Nichols Jr. Middle School the month before when he refused to change out of his t-shirt that read 'There are only two genders.'

He said school officials told him other students were complaining that it made them feel 'unsafe' and was 'disrupting education.'

But by forcing him to change out of the shirt, Morrison claimed the school district was stifling his First Amendment right to free speech.

In his speech to the school board, Morrison said he was taken out of gym class on March 21 to meet with school officials, who told him that people were complaining about his t-shirt, saying it made them feel 'unsafe.'

'They told me that I wasn't in trouble, but I sure felt like I was,' Morrison said of the experience. 'I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class. When I nicely told them I didn't want to do that, they called my father. 'Thankfully, my dad, supportive of my decisions, came to pick me up.

'What did my shirt say?' he continued. 'Five simple words: "There are only two genders." Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.' He added that he did not go to school that day to 'hurt feelings or cause trouble.'

But school officials told him his shirt was 'targeting a protected class.'

'Who is this protected class?' Morrison asked. 'Are their feelings more important than my rights.'

'I don't complain when I see Pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do,' he said.

Morrison also said he was told that 'the shirt was a disruption to learning,' but 'no one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I'm sure I would have noticed if they had.

'I experience disruptions to my learning every day,' he noted. 'Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one and to another?'

The pre-teen added that 'not one person' directly told him they were bothered by the words on his shirt, and in fact, other students told him they supported its message.

But by kicking him out of class, Morrison said, he felt like the middle school was telling him it was not OK for him to have dissenting opinions.

'I have learned a lot from this experience,' he said. 'I learned that a lot of other students share my view. I learned that adults don't always do the right thing or make the right decisions.

'I know that I have a right to wear a shirt with those five words,' Morrison continued. 'Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions and I have a right to express those opinions. Even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.'

'My hope in being here tonight is to bring the School Committee's attention to this issue,' he said. 'I hop that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.

'Next time, it may not only be me,' he concluded. 'There might be more soon that decide to speak out.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12032495/Massachusetts-pupil-kicked-school-wearing-shirt-saying-two-genders.html

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Commie Chic Invades American Grade Schools

Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The line actually comes from Karl Marx.) Four years ago, during Black History Month, a poster of Davis beamed down from the wall of his public elementary school in Brooklyn.

I eagerly praise my son’s charter school to other parents. It’s full of dedicated teachers who urge their students to debate politics and history with an open mind. So I wrote to the administration, proposing that they should balance the school’s homage to Davis with a quotation from Andrei Sakharov or Natan Sharansky, who fought to free the millions of Soviet bloc citizens that Davis wanted to keep locked up. After all, I reasoned, some of the school’s families are themselves refugees from communist tyrannies. My suggestion was met with silence.

Davis, who is now euphemistically celebrated as an “activist,” was in fact a loyal apparatchik who served working-class betrayers, some of whom were murderous bureaucrats, and others outright maniacs who defy any normative political description. Among the objects of her adoration were dullards like the East German leader Erich Honecker and the stupefied (and stupefying) Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, as well as the Reverend Jim Jones. Before the grotesque mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, Davis broadcast a worshipful speech about Jones to the imprisoned Black women who were murdered by his cult.

There’s hardly a more famous American communist than Davis, who twice ran for vice president on the CP ticket and stayed true to the party until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For decades, she tirelessly defended the brutalities of the elderly white men who ran the Eastern bloc. Now entering old age herself, Davis has escaped her rightful place doing penance at a memorial to victims of Stalinist tyranny to become a beacon for American millennials who make Soviet-style Black History Month posters. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has named Davis her “idol.” Omar, like rest of her Squad, is cut from Davis’ pattern: Spurning the legions of African American women who stood up for freedom, she instead celebrates a dedicated lifelong bootlicker of communist-bloc tyrants. What redeems Davis, in the eyes of Omar and her fellow progressives, is apparently the fact that she was put on trial for supplying guns to the Black Panthers who murdered hostages during a 1970 shootout.

My son’s school is not the only one with an enthusiasm for Davis. In 2021, City Journal reported on an elementary school in Philadelphia that led fifth graders in a simulated Black Power rally in which they shouted “Free Angela!,” a reference to Davis’ incarceration on murder and conspiracy charges, and adorned the walls of the school with murals of Davis and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. Last year, a high school in Rockland County, New York, invited Davis to speak on campus (the speech was canceled due to parental outrage). And the website of the National Women’s History Museum offers a lesson plan—Common Core compliant!—on Davis’ thought, which promises to help students “better make sense of the struggles of women and historically marginalized communities.”

Praise for communists like Davis is a sign of the times. After all, the argument goes, they fought for the oppressed and against the evils of capitalism. A colleague who teaches Russian history tells me that in each class a handful of his students announce that they are communists. The students come equipped with handy rationalizations to explain away monstrous Soviet crimes. They argue, for instance, that Stalin was needed to defeat Hitler; if there had been no Stalin, many more Jews would have died in the Holocaust, so the numbers of Stalin’s dead are outweighed by the people Hitler would have killed.

It’s not just the left that makes excuses for the Soviet regime’s crimes. President Trump claimed that Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979 “because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there.” Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB man, models himself after the Soviet rulers in his paranoid wish to silence dissent, his reliance on political assassination, and his use of military force to establish regional dominance, so it’s no surprise that he sees the communist era as a pinnacle of Russian glory. The official Chinese line on Mao is that he was a great leader who made some errors. No Chinese citizen will dare to discuss Mao’s more striking errors, like the 20 million-plus killed by famine during the Great Leap Forward.

The state of Virginia also officially discourages teaching about the criminal behavior of communist regimes. In February the Virginia Senate’s Democrats killed a Republican-sponsored bill that would have required public schools to teach students about the victims of communism. Public school teachers in Virginia are already required to cover slavery and the Holocaust. So why not communism? Because, a representative of the Virginia teachers union explained, “There is a strong association between communism and Asians,” and so studying communism could lead to anti-Asian hate.

Idiots will attack anyone for any reason—a fact to live with. But the Virginia teachers union explanation is plainly bunk. It seems exceedingly unlikely that high school students, after learning about the many millions of Chinese peasants sacrificed at Mao’s whim, would pin the blame for the dictator’s atrocities on the Chinese American kid sitting next to them in class—perhaps a descendent of one of Mao’s victims.

The reality of course is that the Virginia teachers union is loath to desecrate the memories of their own communist poster boy and poster girl heroes. The real reason for failing to include communism in a history curriculum, one suspects, is that it reflects so poorly on the American left, which has so often made common cause with tyrants so long as they were anti-American, while blaming the right for all forms of “oppression.” If “right-wingers” are all racists and fascists, then it follows that communists were the good guys—even when they were committing mass murder.

We need an antidote to such binary madness, to the blatant manufacturing of alibis for some of the 20th century’s biggest psychotics and political killers and presenting this gross propaganda to children as historical fact. A first step in properly educating our children would be to help students grasp what communism did to the psyches of both its victims and beneficiaries, and how it achieved its murderous ends. Understanding communism as a belief system lets us see why it appeals so much to the progressive left—and what today’s authoritarian left has in common with its murderous ancestors.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/communist-chic-american-grade-schools-angela-davis

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Australia: High school pass marks lowered to under 50 per cent

This does no favours to the students. It just degradates their qualifications

Struggling Year 12 students who fail exams and assignments are still passing maths and English subjects, as state curriculum bodies push down pass marks to below 50 per cent.

In results that raise questions about teaching and syllabus standards, fresh “grade boundary” data from the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) shows that Year 12 students scored a “C” pass-mark in specialist maths with an overall mark of 47 out of 100 last year.

In maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths.

In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100.

And Victoria’s “score ranges’’ for coursework units and written exams for each subject in 2021 reveal students could pass some of the final Year 12 science, maths and English exams despite getting two out of three questions wrong.

Teacher shortages are being blamed for the poor results, as schools struggle to find enough teachers with university qualifications in the hard-to-staff maths and science subjects.

Up to 40 per cent of Australian maths students are being taught by teachers who did not specialise in the subject during their four-year education degree at ­university.

Senior maths and science academics and teachers warned yesterday that too many students are leaving Year 12 without the necessary maths skills, blaming both teaching standards and the curriculum.

Professor Jennifer Stow, an eminent researcher at the University of Queensland’s Institute of Molecular Bioscience, said she was “hugely concerned’’ about falling standards among high school maths graduates and criticised “what is being taught and how it’s being taught’’.

“I think students aren’t being taught enough basics in maths to give them a good underpinning to build upon at a higher education level,’’ she said. “Assignments don’t teach them formulae or maths rules or how to do calculations – they are being assessed on assignments that anyone can mark. They should be drilled on maths rules and formulae, and shown the way to do things.’’

Maths teacher Dr Stephen Norton, who spent 15 years teaching mathematics to trainee teachers at Griffith University before returning to the classroom this year, said many students were finishing primary school without knowing their times tables, long division and multiplication, or fractions. “When they get to high school they’re cactus,’’ he said.

“The biggest problem in secondary school is you get a whole bunch of kids coming to school in Grade 7 with the knowledge of Grade 4 or 5.

Education Minister Jason Clare says children and students aren’t as ready for school or university as they used to…
“For some of them, if you ask, ‘What’s seven multiplied by six?’ they can’t do it.

“They don’t know how to multiply, they haven’t been taught long division and they can’t add or multiply fractions.’’

Dr Norton said high school teachers were required to teach to a detailed curriculum so quickly that they did not have time to help students catch up on basic concepts.

“If you’ve got a struggling kid, or a kid who hasn’t quite got it, they will fall behind quite quickly,’’ he said.

Dr Norton said the best way to improve students’ maths results would be to ensure primary school teachers are given more training to teach the subject. “The primary school teachers are so poorly prepared by universities,’’ he said.

Queensland is the only state to publish subject-level grade boundaries, which show that in maths methods, a prerequisite for engineering, the pass mark for Year 12 last year was 45 out of 100 – the same as for base-level general maths. In physics, students needed just 49 marks per cent to pass, while English students passed the subject with just 41 marks out of 100. In biology, the lowest pass mark for a C grade was 48, while in chemistry it was 50, and 44 in modern history.

In Victoria in 2021, the pass mark for the final written exam in biology was 108 out of a possible 240 marks – an effective pass mark of 45 per cent.

In chemistry, the lowest score for a C mark was 78 out of 240 – a pass mark of 32 per cent.

Maths methods had a pass score of 50 out of 160 in the mathematical methods exam, revealing that students answered just one in three questions correctly.

In specialist maths, the pass rate for the written exam was 35 out of 80 marks, meaning students could pass despite failing 56 per cent of the questions.

In the English exam, the lowest score was 26 out of 60 marks – a 40 per cent pass rate.

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority did not respond to The Australian’s requests for comment.

A QCAA spokesman said that a grade of C “matches the objectives of the course and is considered ‘satisfactory’.’’

“Every year we look at the achievement of students to determine the grade boundaries,’’ he said. “This involves the QCAA and expert teachers looking at student performance across their range of assessments in every subject to determine cut-offs that align to each reporting standard on a 100-point scale.

“If the range for a C in a subject is 45-64 marks, it is because the student work that received marks in this range demonstrated the attributes of a C standard as described in the syllabus.

Dr Kevin Donnelly, a senior English teacher, curriculum writer and academic who reviewed the national curriculum in 2014, said Australia set a “low bar’’ for education. “We’ve lowered the bar to create a false picture of how well our students are doing and it breeds complacency,’’ he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/high-school-pass-marks-lowered-to-under-50-per-cent/news-story/defa8e40119399a1ede8f5165846f47c

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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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