Tag: public schools

Kamala Jailed Black Woman For Daughter’s School Absences When Child Had Sickle Cell Anemia

Former Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently shined a light on testimony from a California mother who was jailed by Kamala Harris after the woman’s sickle cell anemia-stricken daughter missed too many school days.

During Harris’ time serving as the District Attorney of San Francisco, she decided to punish parents for their kids’ truancy after learning the state was missing out on around one billion dollars in revenue due to the absences.

RFK Jr. explained video of the mother telling her Kamala story is going “absolutely viral” online.

In the viral clip, the mother explained her daughter was in the hospital for 60 days due to her ailment.

The mom, Cheree Peoples, was eventually arrested over her daughter’s 60-day hospital stay despite the fact she had already graduated high school with a 3.8 GPA.

Kennedy said, “Kamala Harris sent police to her house and handcuffed the mother and jailed her. She lost her job, she lost her home. She had to live in hotels thereafter. The police, when they arrested her she said to them, you can see her on the tape. She said, ‘Are you really going to handcuff me?’ She was wearing her pajamas. She was dragged out of bed, handcuffed behind her back. The police said, ‘If you want to complain, complain to Kamala Harris.’”

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Howling mad! Fury as school allows pupil suffering from ‘species dysphoria’ to identify as a WOLF

A British schoolchild has been officially allowed to identify as a wolf, the Mail can reveal.

The secondary-school pupil is said to suffer from ‘species dysphoria’, which is when someone claims their body belongs to a different species.

Teachers are said to be supporting the youngster.

Growing numbers of schoolchildren are said to be taking on the personalities of creatures including foxes, dragons, birds, snakes, sharks and even dinosaurs.

However, clinical neuropsychologist Dr Tommy MacKay insisted last night: ‘There is no such condition in science as ‘species dysphoria’. It’s not surprising that we are seeing this in an age when many people want to identify as something other than they are.

‘Now we have a council which appears to accept at face value that a child identifies as a wolf, rather than being told to snap out of it and get to grips with themselves, which would be the common-sense approach.’

Confirmation of the first-known case in Scotland in which a school has recognised that a pupil identifies as an animal was revealed in official documents.

The Mail knows the name of the council involved but has decided not to disclose it to protect the identity of the child concerned.

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Student Wearing Black Paint On Face Isn’t Protected By First Amendment: Judge

A middle school student who wore black paint on his face during a California football game is not protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, according to a federal judge.

The student, dubbed J.A. in court papers, his parents, and his lawyers have not shown that wearing the black paint is expressive conduct shielded by the First Amendment, U.S. District Judge Linda Lopez said in a Sept. 30 ruling.

J.A. said he put on the paint during the game to show team spirit, but that doesn’t meet the bar established in other rulings, including a 2019 decision that found “First Amendment protection is only granted to the act of wearing particular clothing or insignias where circumstances establish that an unmistakable communication is being made,” Lopez wrote.

“Based on the current record, it is not likely that [the] plaintiff can prevail on the merits of his First Amendment claim, nor are there serious questions about it. It ‘is possible to find some kernel of expression in almost every activity a person undertakes,’ such as ‘walking,’ ’meeting one’s friends,‘ or ’coming together to engage in recreational dancing‘ and other sports, ’but such a kernel is not sufficient to bring the activity within the protection of the First Amendment,’” she added later, citing from other rulings.

J.A. was suspended for two days by Muirlands Middle School, which said he was wearing blackface despite the black paint being used often by athletes, and accused him or his friends of uttering racial slurs during the October 2023 game.

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Chicago Teachers Told to Give Passing Grades to Illegal Immigrant Students Regardless of Academic Performance: Report

Multiple Chicago teachers have come forward with claims that they were instructed to artificially inflate grades for immigrant students, regardless of their academic performance. 

This explosive allegation, first reported by WGN AM720, has raised serious questions about educational integrity and the challenges faced by sanctuary cities in accommodating a surge of new arrivals.

Chicago, a self-declared sanctuary city, has become home to approximately 50,000 illegal immigrants since 2022. 

Many of these new arrivals have been transported from the southern border, as outlined by The Post Millennial (TPM). 

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Trans-Identifying 19-Year-Old Arrested After Expressing Desire To Shoot Up Elementary School

Iowa police arrested a trans-identifying 19-year-old on Monday and charged her with a “threat of terrorism” after she revealed in therapy that she wanted to shoot up an elementary school, The Daily Wire has learned.

The Norwalk Police Department announced Monday that it had arrested Margaret Anderson after being made aware last week of a “potential threat” to Oviatt Elementary School, located in Norwalk, Iowa. In a release, the department said that Anderson has been charged with a “Threat of Terrorism” under Iowa Code 708A.5, and had been processed into the Warren County Jail.

Anderson is a 19-year-old female who identifies as a transgender man, Warren County Attorney Doug Eichholz confirmed to The Daily Wire on Tuesday. The police department said on Monday that Margaret also went by Maxwell, raising initial suspicions that gender identity was at play in the case.

Eichholz said that the case arose out of statements that Anderson made to her therapist during the course of her “regular treatment.” The therapist then reported the statements to the Des Moines Police Department, he said, which forwarded the information to the Norwalk Police Department in her hometown.

“And then the investigation took off from there,” he explained.

According to Eichholz, the complaint about Anderson says: “The defendant stated that she had thoughts that she wanted to take a gun to Oviatt Elementary School in Norwalk, at 11 am through the cafeteria, and shoot children.”

The complaint did not contain context as to why Anderson was motivated to shoot children, the Warren County Attorney said. He noted that after Anderson shared these thoughts, she was immediately entered into Iowa Lutheran Hospital in Des Moines, which has a mental health facility attached. She was then arrested on Monday, Eichholz said, released Tuesday morning to house arrest with restrictions including a GPS bracelet, and is currently on pretrial release.

Shawn Holloway, superintendent of Norwalk Community School District, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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How Does Israel Justify Genocide? It Starts in the Schools

In The Black Image in the White Mind, historian George M. Frederickson writes, “In the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often revealed by their words and actions that they viewed [Black people] as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population.” Within the context of white American domination, anti-Black racist stereotypes framed Black people as inherently unfit, innately problematic and divorced from the category of the human, a category that is synonymous with whiteness.

The French-Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, understood these racist rationalizations as a series of negations, observing: “The colonized is not this, is not that. [They are] never considered in a positive light; or if [they are], the quality which is conceded is the result of a psychological or ethical failing.” Within these racist binary regimes, it is necessary that a specific group functions as “other.”

Throughout the world, there are groups that are deemed “other,” and their “otherness” is imposed by those who control dominant forms of discourse — those who have the representational power to demean, to marginalize and demonize. Historically, schools and religious institutions have helped to underwrite such dehumanizing discourse.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a retired lecturer in language education at Hebrew University and at the David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem, and the author of several books. In this exclusive interview, she discusses how Israeli schoolbooks (and by extension, Israeli schools) powerfully frame anti-Palestinian discourse and inculcate Israeli children with suspicion, fear and hatred of Palestinians. Peled-Elhanan’s work provides a powerful analysis of the relationship between Israeli state pedagogical power and racist, anti-Palestinian ideology.

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Are Teachers Really Underpaid?

Teachers are underpaid, right? It’s a near-universally repeated maxim. Kamala Harris thinks so. So does Betsy DeVos. However, the reality is a bit more complicated. 

For the 2023–24 school year, the average public school teacher salary was just under $70,000—well over the average for bachelor’s degree graduates ages 25 to 34 (though many teachers have master’s degrees). 

West Virginia paid teachers the least, at around $52,000 per year, while California paid them the most, with an average salary of over $95,000. According to the National Education Association, teacher salaries top out at over $100,000 in 16.6 percent of districts. However, salaries have generally stagnated. From 2002 to 2020, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries declined by 0.6 percent while as per-pupil spending increased. 

The reality is that teacher salaries vary widely between states and districts, especially when looking at pay adjusted for the cost of living, making it difficult to make generalizations. Adding to the murkiness, pay doesn’t seem to motivate teachers as much as many people think. 

According to a December 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, when public school teachers were asked why they decided to leave the profession, only 9.2 percent said it was because they needed higher pay.

A study from earlier this year also concluded that, among teachers who choose to leave their jobs, most don’t earn more in their new position. “The median employed leaver makes less than before they left teaching and their earnings do not recover nearly a decade after exit,” reads the study by University of Chicago and University of California, Irvine researchers. “These broad trends…suggest that factors other than earnings may have contributed to exit decisions for the average leaver.”

“In other words, the economic argument around the teacher pay gap has some holes,” wrote education reporter Chad Aldeman last week in an analysis of this and other studies looking at teacher compensation. “Ironically, the political and media attention focused on teacher wage gaps may also be contributing to a sense that teachers are paid less than they actually are. People tend to underestimate how much teachers actually earn, and that could discourage would-be educators from considering the profession in the first place.”

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School Monitoring Software Sacrifices Student Privacy for Unproven Promises of Safety

Imagine your search terms, key-strokes, private chats and photographs are being monitored every time they are sent. Millions of students across the country don’t have to imagine this deep surveillance of their most private communications: it’s a reality that comes with their school districts’ decision to install AI-powered monitoring software such as Gaggle and GoGuardian on students’ school-issued machines and accounts. As we demonstrated with our own Red Flag Machine, however, this software flags and blocks websites for spurious reasons and often disproportionately targets disadvantaged, minority and LGBTQ youth.

The companies making the software claim it’s all done for the sake of student safety: preventing self-harm, suicide, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. While a noble goal, given that suicide is the second highest cause of death among American youth 10-14 years old, no comprehensive or independent studies have shown an increase in student safety linked to the usage of this software. Quite to the contrary: a recent comprehensive RAND research study shows that such AI monitoring software may cause more harm than good.

That study also found that how to respond to alerts is left to the discretion of the school districts themselves. Due to a lack of resources to deal with mental health, schools often refer these alerts to law enforcement officers who are not trained and ill-equipped to deal with youth mental crises. When police respond to youth who are having such episodes, the resulting encounters can lead to disastrous results. So why are schools still using the software–when a congressional investigation found a need for “federal action to protect students’ civil rights, safety, and privacy”? Why are they trading in their students’ privacy for a dubious-at-best marketing claim of safety?

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Children of Big Brother: What It Means to Go Back-to-School in the American Police State

It’s not easy being a child in the American police state.

Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.

Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry about the Nanny State and its network of busybodies turning parents in for allowing their children to walk to school alone, walk to the park alone, play at the beach alone, or even play in their own yard alone.

The tentacles of the police state even intrude on the sanctity of one’s home, with the government believing it knows better than you—the parent—what is best for your child. This criminalization of parenthood has run the gamut in recent years from parents being arrested for attempting to walk their kids home from school to parents being fined and threatened with jail time for their kids’ bad behavior or tardiness at school.

This doesn’t even touch on what happens to your kids when they’re at school—especially the public schools—where parents have little to no control over what their kids are taught, how they are taught, how and why they are disciplined, and the extent to which they are being indoctrinated into marching in lockstep with the government’s authoritarian playbook.

The message is chillingly clear: your children are not your own but are, in fact, wards of the state who have been temporarily entrusted to your care. Should you fail to carry out your duties to the government’s satisfaction, the children in your care will be re-assigned elsewhere.

This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today: where parents have to worry about school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.

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Academic Freedom Around the World Declining for First Time Since WWII

The halls of academia have long been regarded as bastions of free thought and scientific inquiry. However, a recent study paints a concerning picture of dwindling academic freedom worldwide. This shift, occurring for the first time since World War II, threatens to undermine global innovation at a time when creative solutions may be needed more than ever.

The research, conducted by a team of international researchers, reveals that after decades of steady improvement, global academic freedom has begun to decline over the past decade. This shift represents the first significant downturn since World War II and raises serious concerns about the future of innovation and scientific advancement.

Academic freedom, the right of scholars to pursue research, teach, and express ideas without undue interference, has long been considered a cornerstone of scientific progress. However, its importance to innovation has never been quantitatively measured on a global scale until now. The study’s findings not only confirm the crucial role of academic freedom in driving innovation but also sound a warning about the potential consequences of its current decline.

To investigate this relationship, the researchers analyzed data from 157 countries over a 115-year period, from 1900 to 2015. They used the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) to measure the level of academic freedom in each country and compared it to innovation output, measured by the number of patent applications and citations.

The results, published in PLOS One, were striking. Countries with higher levels of academic freedom consistently produced more patents and received more citations on those patents. Specifically, when a country’s academic freedom increased by one standard deviation, the number of patent applications rose by 41% two years later, and the number of citations increased by 29% five years later.

However, the most alarming finding was the recent downward trend in academic freedom. After steadily increasing from the 1940s to the 2010s, global academic freedom began to decline in the last decade. This reversal was observed not only globally but also among the 25 leading countries in science.

Based on the study’s findings, the researchers project that the recent decrease in academic freedom could lead to a substantial reduction in innovation output in the coming years. This could manifest as fewer new patents and a decrease in impactful research, potentially slowing technological progress and economic growth.

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