I remember how it was -- JR
Monday, December 04, 2023
DIPLOMAS FOR SALE: No attendance required for students willing to pay a few hundred bucks to graduate
Obtaining a diploma in one of Louisiana’s unapproved schools won’t take four years of education, just a few hundred dollars, according to a recent report.
Springfield Prepatory School provides "Christian homeschooling and adult education assistance," according to its website. It also provides adults "that have been through homeschooling" assistance in obtaining their high school diploma.
A list of prices is listed on the front window of the school building: $250 for diploma services, a $50 application fee, $35 for a diploma cover and $130 to walk in a cap and gown at a ceremony, according to an Associated Press report.
Over 21,000 students are enrolled in the unapproved schools across Louisiana, like Springfield Prep, according to the AP. Unlike public schools with hundreds or thousands of students, these private schools are created to serve individual homeschooling families.
Kitty Sibley Morrison, Springfield Prep's principal, told the AP she is not selling diplomas.
"We’re not here to make money," she said. "We serve the poor in ministry here," Sibley Morrison added in a brief statement to Fox News. "Helping them to understand how to use their parental rights to choose homeschooling. We facilitate parental homeschooling with support services."
Arliya Martin accepted her diploma from Springfield Prep this year.
After getting kicked out of high school in 10th grade, Martin attempted to get her GED without success. This summer, she met Morrison and within days had a diploma in her hand. The document was backdated to 2015, according to the AP.
A Louisiana Department of Education spokesperson told the AP diplomas cannot generally be awarded retroactively.
"Adults 21 and younger will get a state-approved diploma based on Louisiana Home Study Guidelines of 2010," the school’s website states. "Older adults can receive a private home school diploma based on the Louisiana Home Study Law of 1972."
Martin’s diploma stated she had completed a program for graduation "approved by the Louisiana Board of Education." Sibley Morrison later admitted there had been a mistake and that the document would be corrected, according to the AP.
Sibley Morrison said her school can advertise "state-approved" diplomas since she encourages families in her program to simultaneously enroll in state-approved home study program.
"I inform the poor of the rights they have had for fifty years, but have been deprived of the knowledge by the media and the public school system," said Sibley Morrison. "I keep on top of all laws regarding Christian homeschooling."
"When parents say, ‘My child is ready to go into the real world’ — I take their word for it," she said.
The number of students enrolled in the state’s unapproved schools has nearly doubled since before the pandemic from around 11,600 in the 2017-18 school year to more than 21,000 in 2022-23, according to data obtained through a public records request by the AP and The Advocate.
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Progressive Public High School Offers Race-Segregated Classes
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.
A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called academic achievement gap by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.
As Evanston, Illinois, School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.”
Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, it offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.
Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.
Of course, federal nondiscrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.
“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”
Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about 1 in 9 black students and 1 in 7 Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.
Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.
“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand.
In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights nondiscrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.
“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”
Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the City Council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past … ”
Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists—the backbone of the abolition movement—and incorporated in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.
Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”
Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”
Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students—white, black, and Latino—who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.
“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”
“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”
“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told The Washington Stand. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years.
“Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”
“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”
America’s educational establishment—such as national teachers unions and education training programs—is pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. It instructs students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.
Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.
Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”
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Mindfulness therapy does little for high-schoolers' mental health, research finds
When a group of teenagers was given eight weeks of therapy and mindfulness training, there was no improvement in their overall mental health, a study has shown.
The University of Sydney paper tracked more than 1,000 year 8 and year 9 high-schoolers, half of whom were given dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), while the other half were not.
DBT is a type of psychological intervention based on various emotional regulation skills centred primarily around mindfulness.
The DBT therapy group engaged in mindfulness and other emotional regulation exercises.
Lead author Lauren Harvey said the only improvements were seen among those students who continued their therapy exercises at home.
The clinical psychologist said these results suggested that participants needed a certain willingness for the therapy to be effective.
"What some of these findings are telling is we need that level of engagement and buy-in," Dr Harvey said.
"The research is starting to show that it's not about a particular strategy, it's actually about how we use certain strategies and in which context we apply them."
She said similar studies in the UK had also cast doubt over the efficacy of mindfulness meditation in classrooms.
Dr Harvey said, therefore, she did not advise these practices be imposed in classrooms or workplaces, since the evidence suggested it was not generally effective.
While companies such as Amazon have introduced mindfulness booths for staff, Dr Harvey said such enthusiasm for mindfulness activities may be misleading.
She said sometimes problems were "systemic", rather than internal. "With the rise of mindfulness in our society it's been branded as a panacea to fix all of our issues, but realistically it's probably not," Dr Harvey said.
Sarah Swannell, a director of Willow Oak Psychology, says DBT is generally not appropriate for children who show no real interest in it. As a DBT clinician, she says the therapy is traditionally used by people actively seeking help for depression, emotional dysregulation, and suicidality.
Dr Swannell also said time frames for the therapy also tended to be much longer than eight weeks, with training often continuing for 12 months.
She said DBT could be effective in a classroom setting, provided it was offered as an opt-in activity.
"The buy-in needs to be not just by the kids who are receiving the intervention, but the entire school," Dr Swannell said. "All of the teachers, the staff, and the administration need to be on board with it so that there's a really positive culture around learning skills."
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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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