Tag: public schools

Canada’s woke Stasi

Under other circumstances, former school trustee Barry Neufeld may have retired as one of your curmudgeonly, albeit amusing, elderly neighbours, equipped with a brash sense of humour, a glass of wine and a cigarette. Had he not introduced himself at a recent panel event I spoke on in Victoria, British Columbia (BC) about the harms of gender-identity ideology, I would never have pegged him as a supposed hate-monger. He seemed rather jovial, in fact. Yet the Canadian media and some of Canada’s most powerful unions see things differently. They have made Neufeld their nemesis.

Neufeld is now in his seventies. His troubles began in 2017. This was when he discovered a new gender-identity curriculum for kids coming down the pike in his school district of Chilliwack, BC. This was the year that the SOGI (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) 123 programme was implemented in public schools across the province, with the aim of making classrooms more ‘inclusive’ for LGBT-identified kids. That same year, Bill C-16 was passed by the national parliament, adding ‘gender identity’ to the list of protected characteristics under the Canadian Human Rights Act. Both pieces of legislation were introduced with little public debate and most Canadians were completely unaware of what was even happening.

But Neufeld noticed and spoke out on Facebook, criticising SOGI 123 for instructing ‘children that gender is not biologically determined, but is a social construct’. ‘At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe’, he wrote, ‘I have to say that I support traditional family values and I agree with the [American College of Pediatricians] that allowing little children to choose to change gender is nothing short of child abuse’.

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Indiana Teacher and Democrat County Chair Arrested For Masturbating in Front of His Students

A teacher and Democratic Party official in Indiana has been charged and arrested with masturbating in front of his students.

According to court filings obtained by The Commercial Review, 37-year-old Joel Bowers allegedly masturbated under his desk while teaching in April of this year.

A 14-year-old girl who witnessed the incident told law enforcement Bowers “would not get out of his seat and didn’t tell us to do anything.”

“There was white stuff on his pants and he would not get up for anything. He had his hand down there and was sweating but it was cold in his room,” she explained.

“His hands was down there but when someone went up there he would wipe his hand off with paper towel.”

Students who witnessed Bowers pleasuring himself captured the incident on camera and submitted it to investigators. The footage purportedly shows him looking at his phone while engaging in the act.

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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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