Tag: public schools

What Could Go Wrong? Millions of US Kids to Be Taught in School Which News is “Fake”

NewsGuard, a controversial service that ranks news sources read by clients online based on how trustworthy it considers them to be, will soon be available for free to millions of schoolchildren in the US.

The New York-based company signed a licensing agreement with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers’ union in the country, making the service available to members and their students, the two said this week.

AFT President Randi Weingarten called the deal a game-changer when it comes to helping kids, “particularly our middle, high school and postsecondary students, separate fact from fiction.”

She called NewsGuard “a beacon of clarity to expose the dark depths of the internet and uplift those outlets committed to truth and honesty rather than falsehoods and fabrications.”

The service was launched in 2018, when the position that Big Tech should openly censor information that it deemed undesirable was not as pervasive in the US as it is today. NewsGuard ranks thousands of news sources with a “street light” color code, and puts a nutrition label-like explanation on each one to explain the score.

The service comes in the form of a browser plug-in and costs $2.95/month, except for users of Microsoft Edge, since Microsoft licensed it to be a built-in feature of its browser in 2019.

NewsGuard claims to be apolitical and to apply a rigorous process when assessing the integrity of news outlets. After its launch, skeptics, however, questioned the abundance of people linked to the US government among its advisory board.

One of them, Richard Stengel, who served under Barack Obama as the Department of State’s public affairs chief, said on the record that state propaganda was fine and that all nations subjected their citizens to it.

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Diversity Training Tells Teachers That Kids Aren’t ‘Racially Innocent’

A number of teachers in the UK have been told that children as young as seven years old are not ‘racially innocent’ during mandatory diversity training.

During classes described as “Racial Literacy 101” sessions, a number of UK-based teachers have been told that kids as young as seven should not be thought of as “racially innocent”.

Brighton and Hove City Council — which has since been accused of “indoctrinating” children —  has said that the classes are “required for all staff” in schools.

According to an exposé by The Telegraph, 300 teachers have undertaken the training so far, which will supposedly inform “specific racial literacy-focused lessons” for school kids.

In documents seen by the publication, the course includes reference to “covert white supremacy” — which is partially defined during the course as denying white privilege — and also claims that young children are often seen as “racially innocent” despite supposed “ample evidence” showing that this is not the case.

“Between the ages of three and five, children learn to attach value to skin colour; white at the top of the hierarchy and black at the bottom,” The Telegraph reports one of the course documents as claiming.

The UK paper also reports that the consultant giving the session described Christianity as influencing the slave trade, and that they claimed that society obsesses over the muscle size of black sportsmen, but not those of their white rivals.

Also noted is that the city council is advertising a “race adviser” job with an advertised salary of £50,000 to £55,000 pro rata for two and a half days a week.

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If Parents Pulled Their Kids From School For Covid Insanity, It Would Already Be Over

For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.

We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.

What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.

These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.

If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?

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State-Run Pre-K Resulted in Worse Educational, Behavioral Outcomes for Kids

Over and over again, the Biden administration has touted the benefits of “universal” preschool and pre-kindergarten (pre-K) education. These programs, a White House fact sheet declares, are “critical to ensuring that children start kindergarten with the skills and supports that set them up for success in school.” Indeed, they are so critical, in this view, that President Joe Biden’s stalled spending bill plans to devote what the White House calls a “historic $200 billion investment in America’s future” to expanding access to preschool and pre-K schooling. 

Biden himself has advertised the supposed benefits of the new spending, which would roll out through state-based partnerships, on his Twitter feed, with an October post declaring that “studies show that the earlier our children begin to learn in school, the better. That’s why we’re going to make two years of high-quality preschool available to every child.”

On the contrary, a recently published study of a state-run pre-K program in Tennessee found that not only did the program not produce any long-term educational gains, by sixth grade, the children who attended the state’s pre-K program were actually performing worse on both educational attainment and behavioral metrics relative to their peers. State-run pre-K appears to have entirely negative effects for children enrolled.

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Education Department Tells All NY Parents That Kids Have To Mask Despite Supreme Court Ruling It Illegal

The New York State Education Department has informed parents that they are not allowed to send their children to school unmasked even though the New York State Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the mask mandate is illegal.

The department rationalized that they can ignore the ruling because they plan to appeal.

Spencerport Superintendent Kristin Swann said to parents in an email obtained by The Daily Wire that the department “continues to mandate that all individuals in school settings must wear masks.”

“The State Education Department (SED) continues to mandate that all individuals in school settings must wear masks under the current regulations until legal appeals are exhausted,” Swann said in the email.

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Undercover Students EXPOSE Colorado High School Vaccine Clinic For Administering Vaccinations Without Parental Consent – Even AFTER School Superintendent ASSURED This Would Not Happen

Libs of TikTok is dropping bombs once again.

On Monday night, the independent journalist exposed yet another issue within US Public School system – this time, posting a damning thread that includes two undercover videos taken by a pair of brave high school students that show employees of a Colorado High School’s mobile vaccine clinic allowing underage children to receive the experimental jab without their parent’s consent.

The inexcusable incident occurred this past Friday during a Tri-County Health Department-sponsored Covid vaccine clinic that was held at Heritage High School in Denver, Colorado.

In two separate videos that were taken a short time apart by the teenagers – one who’s 15 and the other who’s 16 – employees of the mobile clinic can be seen signing them in and clearing them to get the jab – even though they showed up alone, which is something the school had assured parents would not happen under any circumstances.

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Virginia Teachers Vow To Exclude, Bully Maskless Students

Teachers from multiple school districts in northern Virginia reportedly vowed to exclude maskless students from their classrooms, according to private social media posts obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

School districts and teachers alike promised to defy newly-inaugurated Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s repeal of in-school mask mandates. Districts including Arlington Public Schools (APS) and Alexandria County Public Schools (ACPS) claim that universal masking reduces the transmission rate of COVID-19, though the districts point only to CDC data and not any specific study.

ACPS seemingly doubled down on masking students and sent an email announcing that the district received a shipment of KN-95 masks and other surgical masks that allow for double masking, days after Youngkin announced the mask mandate repeal. 

Teachers in other districts promised to take on maskless students by themselves. Heather Lynn Reilly Osial, a teacher in Prince William County Public Schools, reportedly said that students who refuse to wear a mask will not be allowed in her classroom.

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Meet The Seattle Schools Woke Indoctrination Czar Who Married A Child Molester

Spend enough time studying the “racial equity” and “ethnic studies” programs sweeping school districts across the nation and you’ll find that they are following in the footsteps, on a several-year delay, of one of America’s most progressive cities: Seattle.

It’s worth examining, then, how all that worked out in Seattle. Despite decades of the most aggressive equity programs anyone could ask for, Seattle’s racial disparities are among the worst in the nation – and they’re getting worse, not better.

At the forefront of Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) initiatives was Tracy Castro-Gill, until recently its director of ethnic studies, who represented herself as a fierce Chicana who overcame homelessness and was willing to take on racism no matter who she had to battle, turning schools into vehicles for social change.

Castro-Gill, it turned out, was a perennially unhappy toxic liar, one who misrepresented her background to the point that her own father compared her to Rachel Dolezal, and who was ultimately pushed out of her job for repeated misconduct. A focus on racial oppression did not create resiliency, but rather despondency, with Castro-Gill and three other racial justice leaders going on paid leave from SPS for mental health issues in 2019 alone.

As Castro-Gill used children for politics in the workplace, her personal life also raised questions about the costs that can incur. She married a convicted child molester and moved her young daughter in with him. Then, her previous ex-husband told me, she pressured her child, who had serious mental impairments, to become gender-nonbinary.

The academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted as she implemented initiatives like replacing math instruction with courses on “power and oppression.” But in this world, there was no such thing as failing: Those gaps were used to justify still more jobs and efforts like hers. What follows is the never-before-told story of America’s first “woke” school system.

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Maryland Parents Shocked to Learn Children Were Given Race and Gender Scorecards to Calculate Privilege

A mother in Carroll County, Md., reported that students, including her daughter, were recently given race and gender privilege scorecards to complete as part of their preparation for an upcoming reading assignment in English class. Accompanying the scorecards were other media elaborating on the concept of privilege.

When the daughter questioned her teacher on what privilege has to do with learning English, expressing concerns that the material seemed “racist towards whites” and that it “portrayed the police in a negative light,” the teacher reacted by saying it was actually good to have those feelings and that the purpose of the lesson is to foster uncomfortable conversations.  

The girl’s mother sees things differently, calling such topics in the classroom “absolutely appalling.” She continued: “They’re teaching our kids to view and treat people based on their skin color, rather than treating each other as individuals. How this belongs in an English class is beyond me.”

The Concerned Parents of Carroll County Maryland, a local group organized to remove political indoctrination in schools and promote common-sense COVID policies, were originally sent the classroom documents. The group has received similar reports from many students and parents throughout their community’s school system. 

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