I remember how it was -- JR
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Another Big-Name Law Firm Has a Message for Pro-Hamas Students
Proving that, at least in some corners of the world, actions still have consequences, another big-name law firm has announced that it revoked job offers provided to law students after they signed on to pro-Hamas statements in the wake of barbaric attacks that saw more than one thousand Israelis slaughtered by the Iran-backed terrorists.
The U.S.-based international law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell — described by The Daily Beast as "revered" — said on Tuesday that it had revoked its employment offers to three law students from Harvard and Columbia citing the students' "contravention of our firm's value system" with their statements blaming Israel for the horror that befell its people.
"The views expressed in certain of the statements signed by law school student organizations in recent days are in direct contravention of our firm's value statement," Davis Polk & Wardwell said in a statement to Bloomberg Law, through the firm did not name the three students whose offers were revoked.
Another internal email viewed by Bloomberg Law showed the firm's chair and managing partner Neil Barr calling the anti-Israel statements "simply contrary to our firm's values" and explaining "we thus concluded that rescinding these offers was appropriate in upholding our responsibility to provide a safe and inclusive work environment for all Davis Polk employees."
As Leah reported previously, the firm of Winston & Strawn similarly withdrew a job offer for a law student at NYU who wrote in a newsletter that "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life" which was, of course, actually caused by barbaric Hamas terrorists.
Townhall has also worked to document the leaders of student groups at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Virginia who authored or signed on to similar statements blaming Israel for the rape and slaughter of its citizens.
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UK: Girls hatched a 'playground plot' to get maths teacher Jonathan Hawker sacked
This is the male teacher who was awarded almost £45,000 after he was sacked from his job at an all-girls grammar school when pupils allegedly made up sex assault claims ‘for fun’.
Jonathan Hawker, a maths and computer teacher, can be seen smiling in a series of pictures with family and his pet golden retriever Ralph.
But his world was turned upside down when pupils at all-girls school Devonport High School for Girls in Plymouth, Devon, made the ‘career-ending allegations’ against him in 2021.
Despite having an unblemished disciplinary record during his five years at the school Mr Hawker was suspended, arrested and then fired for ‘gross misconduct’. It came despite reports that the girls had admitted they lied about everything ‘because it was fun’.
The teacher has now been awarded £44,868 after a tribunal in Bristol decided that the school had carried out a ‘wholly inadequate’ investigation and failed to ‘provide a safe working environment for its staff, in particular the men.’
Mr Hawker, a father as well as a keen skier and mountain biker from Plymouth, is understood to have since found a new job but could not be reached for comment on the verdict.
Employment Judge Martha Street slammed the school’s investigation into the girls’ allegations, saying: ‘A fair investigation would at the least have included a transcript of the interviews with them.
‘I make no finding on whether Mr Hawker committed the misconduct alleged.
‘What I can say is that if he is innocent, and a playground plot can end a career and destroy a reputation, the school is not providing a safe working environment for its staff, in particular for its male staff.
‘No reasonable employer would conclude that the younger girls were giving truthful evidence in good faith without question; that is, without exploring the contrary evidence including the contemporary evidence from the older girls of a plot against Mr Hawker.
‘In a career-ending case, the investigation has to be as full as possible.
‘This fell well short of that. The school accepted the evidence of the younger pupils without challenge or exploration and discounted, ignored or avoided finding contrary evidence.’
In June 2021, a student wrote a statement to her tutor that another girl – identified only as Student H – had said Mr Hawker had touched her leg, the hearing was told.
Ruth Morgan, the head of safeguarding, spoke to Student H, who said that during a lesson Mr Hawker had knelt down next to her and put his hand on her thigh, the tribunal heard.
In further discussions with other pupils, Mrs Morgan heard of a ‘similar incident’ described by students, as well as false rumours Mr Hawker had previously been suspended for ‘touching a Year 9 student’ and had an affair with a sixth former.
The hearing was told that on the instruction of the school’s acting head, Beverly Bell, Mrs Morgan took statements from the girls.
One girl, Student D, reported that Mr Hawker had made her feel ‘very uncomfortable’, by ‘massaging my shoulders and stroking my arms’.
She said she had seen Mr Hawker stroking other girls’ thighs and that other girls, Student G and Student F, had said that happened to them.
The teacher was also accused of winking at girls.
As a result of numerous other reports from the girls, which all alleged serious misconduct, Mr Hawker was suspended pending investigation on June 28, 2021.
However, in July, two girls from the year above said they had been stood with the group of accusers when they admitted they tried to get Mr Hawker fired ‘for fun’.
When the older pair asked why, one of the girls had told them ‘because it was fun’ and another one added: ‘Yeah we said he touched our thighs trying to get him done for sexual assault’.
This was reported to Mrs Bell on July 9, before school year ended on July 23.
However, the tribunal heard that the school ‘appeared to reject’ the older students’ account.
In September 2021, Mr Hawker was arrested in a ‘brutal experience’ after two of the original group agreed to police involvement, the hearing was told. It was his first knowledge of the allegations.
An internal investigation was launched at the school in November.
Mrs Morgan interviewed Students D, E, F and G – during which Student D withdrew some allegations and said she no longer wanted to be involved.
She didn’t interview the older students, L and M, about what they had spoken to the girls about – instead categorising it as ‘facts that had not been established’.
In December 2021, Mr Hawker was invited to an ‘investigatory interview’, where he said Student F and G had ‘concocted’ stories after he separated them for doing no work.
Mrs Morgan’s report concluded Mr Hawker ‘overstepped the boundaries and failed to consider the welfare of the students’ and ‘repeatedly recited’ her opinion he was guilty of each allegation.
At a disciplinary hearing in February last year, Mr Hawker was dismissed for gross misconduct.
In March 2022, police decided the charges against him would not proceed.
In the following April a temporary prohibition order by the Teachers Regulation Agency banning him from the classroom was lifted.
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Anxiety, ADHD, ‘snowplough parents’: Behind Australia's worsening school discipline crisis
With her booming voice, no-nonsense attitude and gaze that could wilt cactus, Megan*, a 30-something teacher, oozes authority. The untrained eye might see her as petite, but to students she’s towering. One day, as she walked down a corridor of her boxy, ageing Sydney public high school, she heard a six-foot, year 12 boy curse. “F---, you’re short!” he said in surprise. “It’s so weird. You don’t seem like that in front of the classroom.“
Megan is one of the lucky ones; a teacher born to run a room. Eyes in the back of her head. A look that stings. An instinct for weaponising silence. And yet even Megan, who is using a pseudonym because she would be fired for speaking out, is struggling to manage student behaviour. “When I first got to this school, I was like, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” she says. “I’m pretty strong, but it’s been so bad that I’ll sit at the front with my laptop and say, ‘Teach yourselves.’ “
There’s the occasional crisis – fights, knives, drugs – but there always has been. The pressing problem is disruption. In a high school such as Megan’s, it might be boys streaming cage fights in class or girls ignoring the teacher to chat among themselves. They swear at each other, harass peers, refuse to participate. “It’s getting worse, yes – a thousand per cent,” Megan says. “If the media really knew what happened inside schools, the places would be shut down.”
Students tell us themselves that Australian schools are among the most disorderly in the world. When 15-year-olds were last surveyed by the OECD in 2018 about noise and disruption in their classrooms alongside peers from 75 other countries, Australia was eight places from the bottom. Local studies also show teachers are struggling with behaviour, and a long-term, annual survey of principals suggests disrespect and aggression are getting worse.
The reasons are myriad. Complications of technology, such as social media fights and bullying spilling over into school; the lingering effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on social development; scant resources to deal with skyrocketing diagnoses of autism, anxiety and ADHD; a “crisis of adult authority”, as one expert described it; and a more diverse social landscape than ever before, in which children bring wildly differing family norms to the classroom.
Sceptics dismiss the behaviour crisis as a moral panic fuelled by reactionaries worried that a spared rod has left children spoilt. But there is a tangible problem at its heart: disorderly classrooms are bad for learning. Some believe this is why Australia’s academic results are falling. If disruption halts a lesson 10 times, even for just a minute on each occasion, that’s “10 minutes of teaching time you lose out of 50”, says Lisa Holt, the principal of Rosebud Secondary College in Victoria, whose students had forgotten “basic manners and courtesy” when they returned from lockdowns.
Many teachers don’t have Megan’s natural gifts. Controlling a classroom might seem like an educator’s core business, but they were never taught how to do it. Old-fashioned discipline, with its connotations of harsh, corporal punishment, has been replaced by a decades-old creed that behaviour is the language used by young people to communicate their needs and improves when those needs are met. With four million Australian students, each with their own needs, that puts a lot of pressure on teachers.
The backlash against the behaviour-as-language philosophy is gaining momentum across the English-speaking world. Proponents of what’s being called the “neo-strict” movement – rules and routines with the “neo” addition of positive reinforcement – say it misinterprets human nature. Misbehaviour is not a pathology nor a symptom of a more profound problem, says Tom Bennett, the adviser to England’s education department, who has been dubbed Britain’s behaviour tsar. Students, he says, “usually misbehave because they feel like it, and they think they can get away with it”.
Politicians admit there’s a problem. A Senate inquiry considering “the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms” is set to report next month, and a federal government-ordered report this year ruled that universities must include lessons in how to control classrooms in their education degrees. But those are longer-term fixes, and right now, many students are having their one shot at education curtailed by constant interruptions. Schools need to act, but they can’t agree on how: is the answer to toughen up – or try a little more tenderness? After decades in the doghouse, the discipline debate is back.
It’s late Monday afternoon, and three teachers from different primary schools slump, exhausted, over tea and biscuits in a suburban Sydney kitchen. They’re nervous because they are taking a risk; their employers’ ban on contact with journalists means they could be fired for speaking to Good Weekend. But they’re fed up. Not with the kids, but with what they say is a lack of help with the behavioural issues wearing them down.
Mondays can be difficult in schools. Students might have spent their weekend cooped up in units playing computer games and are full of pent-up energy when they arrive in the classroom. Some hate returning to class because they’re falling behind, and their shame manifests in aggression and defiance. For others, home is far more permissive than school, and they struggle to adjust to different expectations.
As he munches on a biscuit, one of the teachers around the kitchen table, a softly spoken, blond 30-something called Mike* recalls explaining to a puzzled father that it’s not okay for a student to yank down another’s shorts at school, even if it’s a favourite prank at home. “He looked at me like I was an extremist prude,” he says. Another teacher – Mary*, a pretty, studious 30-something who works in an underprivileged area – called one mother to say her primary-aged son had been in a fight; the mother responded with relief that her son wasn’t a wimp. “She’d told her child that if someone is disrespectful, you punch them.”
Dysregulation leads to big arguments over little things. “Disagreeing over the rules in footy ends in physical violence, rather than just working it out,” says Kate*, an empathetic and passionate young woman. “They’ll come into class very unsettled, to the point where oftentimes it’ll be yelling, screaming, swearing at staff.” (Some schools have restricted before-school play for this reason.) When such students arrive in the classroom, the teacher has to help them calm down. “Often they can’t self-regulate and you have to intervene, which takes you away from the rest of the class,” she says. “The others get restless. It snowballs.”
The restlessness, says Mary, manifests as chatter, rolling around on the floor and calling out. One child says, “I’m not doing that,” and their friends follow. They’re more likely to behave for their main teacher, who knows them better, than a casual or once-a-week art teacher. “Generally speaking, they wouldn’t say ‘F--- you’ to a classroom teacher – although some do,” Mary says. “It’s when they have [different] staff, with whom they don’t have as strong a relationship. They might see them twice a week but don’t, for some reason, want to show them any respect.“
Parents used to back schools when it came to discipline. Some still do. But others don’t and will believe their child’s version over the teacher’s, or complain about the unfairness of consequences – something teachers say is more common in wealthier areas where there’s more “snowplough parenting” (trying to remove obstacles facing their children). One principal tells of a mother who offered to sit her daughter’s detention. Another says students use their mobile phones to text Mum or Dad straight after a ticking-off and, within minutes, the parent calls the office. “It undermines school authority,” she says.
More here:
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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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