I remember how it was -- JR
Education Choice Empowers Californian Families Facing Continuous School Closures
After the pandemic lockdowns, it seemed schools and their employees would do anything to stay open. But recent school closures due to strikes in large California school districts show that the traditional public education system is not prioritizing students' academic and social well-being.
In March, two Los Angeles-based K-12 employee unions, in solidarity, closed Los Angeles Unified schools for three days when the district rejected the service employees union's demands which included a 30 percent pay increase. Eventually, a tentative agreement was reached that gave service employees in the school district their 30 percent raise and allowed the teachers union to continue negotiating their own new deal. Just last week, 88 percent of the Oakland Education Association members who are employees in the school district authorized a strike to shut down Oakland Unified Schools. The strike started May 4th and will continue for the foreseeable future if the district does not meet its demands, which include a 23 percent pay raise, installation of drought-resistant shrubbery, and many other wants laid out in a 7-page common goods list.
In both cases, the unions deliberately excluded students and their families from these negotiations, but that's no surprise. The public education system has rewarded unions that dispossessed students of academic instruction and services for years. Unless state legislators make education choice options available for Californians, many students will continue to suffer from the union's manipulation of the system.
Over the past thirty years, there have been 75 work stoppages by K-12 public employees, with a third of those strikes occurring in the last five years. The uptick in strikes is primarily due to what Derrell Bradford, the President of 50CAN, calls a "Rolling National Teacher Strike," where the K-12 public sector unions have consistently been rewarded for closing down schools.
For example, in January 2019, the United Teachers of Los Angeles went on strike for an entire week. The district responded by giving the union a six percent pay increase and smaller class sizes. A similar story happened this past March when that same union joined the local K-12 service employees union in closing schools down for another three days. Following the strike, the union used students' learning as a bargaining chip to allow them to receive a 21 percent pay raise over the next three years without giving any assurance the union would not close schools again shortly.
But more school closures are the last thing any Californian student needs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, California closed its schools for a significantly longer period of time than many other states nationwide, and students are still experiencing the harm from these overextended school closures, both socially and academically.
For instance, California's fourth graders experienced a learning loss worth nearly six years of gains in Math and English Language proficiency. School closures also create fundamental dilemmas for working parents, many of whom struggle to get by in the current economic climate, as parents cannot afford to take unpaid leave or be forced to underwrite the union's strike with PTO. Still, despite leaving families high and dry, these unions have been rewarded with millions of dollars of compensation and new legislation at the state level to potentially increase teacher salaries by fifty percent over the next seven years.
Nonetheless, these strikes have resulted in many students leaving public schools permanently in favor of learning pods, private schools, microschool, and other alternative learning models. For many families sick of routinely being subjected to the whims of K-12 employee unions, alternative education models free of union interests offer more reliability and educational stability. But all too often, these options are financially out of reach. Wealthier families can usually choose the best education option for their students — whether by living in a nicer neighborhood with better public schools or paying out of pocket for private education. However, the same cannot be said for students from lower-income families who can't always afford private education.
Education Saving Accounts (ESAs) can level the playing field by giving all families access to a sum of per-pupil spending designated for their child's education — in California, that's nearly $17,000 a year as of 2020. ESAs are the gold standard of education choice legislation, granting families the necessary funds to provide for their child's unique educational needs, including school tuition, private tutoring, special needs therapies, or trade skills. Moreover, a recent Georgia Public Policy Foundation study found that ESAs result in "higher lifetime earnings and increased academic achievement."
California currently lacks an ESA or any private school choice legislation. State legislators must propose and pass an ESA in the next legislative session to give students and their families a fighting chance. If they do, all California students stand to benefit as each student, no matter their background, can finally escape the union's grasp.
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We Have To Hold Our Children Close
The Left's hysterical claims about so-called “book bans” doesn't make any sense because, as always, the people making the claims aren't being honest about their true concerns. The real issue here is that we are trying to exercise control over the material that our children are exposed to — they don't want us stepping between our children and them.
President Biden made the agenda clear during a speech in the Rose Garden yesterday, meant to honor the 2023 national and state teachers of the year:
"There is no such thing as someone else's child, the president declared. Your child is not your child. Your child belongs to everyone."
You might like to think that Biden doesn't mean this literally, that it's just a meaningless platitude. But remember that he belongs to the same party that just passed this law in Washington State. The New York Post reports:
“A Washington State bill that would strip parents' rights to intervene on their kids' medical care in certain circumstances passed the House Wednesday, clearing its pathway to being signed by Gov. Jay Inslee.
'An act relating to supporting youth,' or Senate Bill 5599, allows host homes for runaway youth 'to house youth without parental permission.'
Furthermore, the host homes do not need to notify parents about where their kids are or if they are getting medical interventions 'if there is a compelling reason not to, which includes a youth seeking protected health services.'
The 'protected health care services' included 'gender-affirming care,' which for minors arbitrarily included anything prescribed by a doctor to treat dysphoria, the bill said. 'Gender affirming treatment can be prescribed to two-spirit, transgender, nonbinary, and other gender diverse individuals,' the bill stated.
Another 'compelling reason' not to notify parents about kids staying in a host home was 'circumstances that indicate notifying the parent or legal guardian will subject the minor to abuse or neglect.’”
In other words, if a child in Washington state decides that he wants to undergo a medical gender transition, and his parents object, all he has to do is run away from home, land at one of these “host homes,” and from there his parents will be stripped of all rights to protect him from being sterilized and butchered.
Keep in mind that refusing to affirm your child's gender confusion, telling him that he's really a boy even though he thinks he's a girl, counts as “abuse and neglect” according to the people who write laws like this.
This is how they will, and have already begun, to, strip rights away from parents across the country and induct children into the gender cult by force. First they set the stage by declaring that a lack of affirmation is abusive. Then they “come to the rescue” by extracting the children from those “abusive” homes and leaving them in the arms of the state, where they can be shaped and molded — in a literal, physical sense — and made into the sort of person that the system wants them to be.
So who exactly is consenting to the procedure in a case where the parent has been cut out completely? The child cannot consent. The parent does not consent. Who is authorizing this?
The answer is that the parent is authorizing it, because a new parental figure has been appointed. Joe Biden said that our nation's children are all of our children.
But we already know from extensive experience that when anyone on the Left uses the word “our” or “us” or “we” they do not mean it in a general collective sense. This is an “us” that does not include you.
“Us” means the system, the institutions, the powers that be. “Our nation's children are all our children” means that “our nation's children are the system's children.” It will raise your child. It will decide what is best for him. It will take charge of his formation — both physical and moral.
As should be clear to everyone by now, the family unit is the greatest threat to the system. It is the Left's greatest enemy. The Left hates local authority, militating against localization in every form. It wants you to be totally subject to overarching, inhuman bureaucratic powers.
It wants your life to be run by institutions that do not know you, do not love you, and do not recognize you as a distinct individual. And the most localized structure, the most local form of authority, is the family.
In a healthy family, the members all look to each other for love, guidance, purpose. This makes them much harder to influence, harder to control.
And so the family must be destroyed, and all of the vibrant and fulfilling bonds that define it — the bond between husband and wife, the bond between parent and child — must be severed and replaced by the lifeless, empty bond between subject and system, where the subject can be unmade and remade in the image of the institutions that wish to control his life.
That is what they intend to do to you and especially to your children. And it's why we have to hold our children close, and never allow it.
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.pol-incorrect/c/goCt-IgNvNc
************************************************Bill would end early, legacy admissions at NY colleges, universities
State lawmakers are eyeing a ban on the practice of early admission to colleges and universities as the legislative session nears its end, with progressives claiming the practice is racist.
Supporters of a bill that would outlaw early admission — in which prospective students agree to attend their top-choice college in exchange for acceptance earlier in the admission cycle — as well as legacy admissions say both practices disproportionately help white and wealthy students get into prestigious schools like Columbia, NYU, and Cornell.
“The bill seeks to eliminate structural barriers created by legacy and early admissions policies which tend to reward connected and affluent white students and discriminate against students of color and first-generation students like myself,” Assemblywoman Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill in her chamber, said Monday.
Supporters of the legislation aim to get it passed by leveraging opposition to a potential Supreme Court ruling in cases challenging race-based admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
“If the Supreme Court is not going to allow us to use affirmative action to help improve economic and racial diversity on college campuses,” state Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn), who is sponsoring the bill in his chamber, said Monday, “then we, the state of New York, will not allow the same institutions to use affirmative action for privileged students in picking and choosing which children or grandchildren of their alumni they will choose.”
Supporters of the Albany effort say early admissions are problematic because they require students to commit to a school before they know what financial aid they might get, a situation that data suggests helps white students who tend to be wealthier than those from other groups.
“Applying early decision requires two things. It requires college admissions know-how and money, which may be why students attending private high schools are more than three times more likely than public high school students to apply early decisions,” Gounardes said, referring to a 2022 study by the advocacy group Education Reform Now.
Roughly two-thirds of private school students in New York City are white, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute analysis.
Meanwhile, most of the top universities in the country give some advantage to family members of alumni, who are approximately 45% more likely to win admission compared to non-legacy students with similar qualifications, according to the Century Foundation.
“At a time when universities are seeking to diversify by race and socioeconomic status, legacy preferences, on average, negatively impact minority and low-income students,” Richard Kahlenberg, then a senior fellow at the think tank, wrote in a 2018 letter to Congress.
And while legacy admissions are race-neutral on their face, Kahlenberg wrote at the time, they have roots in policies that replaced admission quotas for groups like Jews.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/08/bill-threatens-early-legacy-admissions-at-ny-colleges/
******************************************************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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