Tag: public schools

California Schools Drop ‘D’ and ‘F’ Grades in a Shift to ‘Competency-Based’ Learning 

Some of the largest school districts in California are dropping “D” and “F” grades, moving towards what they call “competency-based” learning.

Oakland Unified, Sacramento City Unified, Santa Ana, Los Angeles, and other school districts across the state are limiting the use of “D” grades and phasing out “Fs” entirely.

Instead of failing an assignment or exam, students now have the option to retake a test and have additional time to complete an assignment.

Proponents of the move hope it will encourage students to learn and not worry about the fear of a low grade pushing them off the pathway to university.

Nidya Baez, assistant principal at an Oakland Unified high school, said:

Our hope is that students begin to see school as a place of learning, where they can take risks and learn from mistakes, instead of a place of compliance. Right now, we have a system where we give a million points for a million pieces of paper that students turn in, without much attention to what they’re actually learning.

Others also criticized the traditional grading method for its subjectivity and its psychological impact on school-aged children.

Keep reading

NYC Proposes New Rules to ‘Silence’ Parents Critical of Education Policies, Parents Say

Outgoing New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is trying to leave behind him a rule that could potentially silence parents who criticize school board policies, according to two parents and board leaders.

In an op-ed published in The New York Post, Maud Maron and Danyela Souza Egorov said that a proposed regulation would allow the Department of Education (DOE) to “discipline and remove” parents elected to Community Education Councils (CEC)—New York City’s equivalent to a school board—if they “criticize the school district they are meant to hold accountable.” Maron is a former president of the CEC in District 2, and Danyela Souza Egorov is its vice president.

The proposed Chancellor’s Regulation D-210, which will be weighed by the DOE’s Panel for Educational Policy on Dec. 21, prohibits council members from engaging in conduct that “serves to harass, intimidate, or threaten.” Such conduct includes but is not limited to “frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and causes others to have concern for their personal safety.”

The criteria used to determine what counts as a violation is vague, Maron and Egorov argued. The rule doesn’t explain how frequent is frequent or what kind of speech is unnecessary or aggressive. On top of that, an “Equity Compliance Officer” would be established to enforce the rule.

“This (no doubt expensive) bureaucrat would be charged with deciding who to target for removal for violating the newly expanded ‘code of conduct,’” they wrote, calling it “yet another administrative position to monitor parents.”

Keep reading

CA School Bribed Boy with Pizza to Get Covid Jab Without Parent’s Consent, Told Him to Keep it Secret

Maribel Duarte is not an anti-vaxxer, in fact, she is fully vaccinated as well as the rest of her family. However, her 13-year-old son suffers from allergy and lung conditions so she was holding off on getting him vaccinated due to these problems.

“Regarding my son’s health, I am against it,” she said.

Unfortunately, being against it is no longer an option, however, as the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) took it upon themselves to vaccinate her son for her — without her consent.

Duarte told NBC 4 News her 13-year-old son came home with a vaccine card after saying yes to being vaccinated in exchange for pizza at the Barack Obama Global Prep Academy school in South LA.

The LAUSD has also taken it upon themselves to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine for all children over the age of 12. They must receive the jab before January 10, 2022 or children will be forced into virtual learning and blocked from entering campus.

The statement on the LAUSD website read,

“Attention families of students aged 12 or older—this is your reminder to get your child vaccinated. Your first dose must be uploaded into Daily Pass no later than December 19, 2021. Both doses must be uploaded before January 10, 2022!”

Apparently, the district has since began a campaign to vaccinate students at school and is rewarding them with pizza. What’s more, according to Duarte, the unknown woman who vaccinated her son told her son to keep it a secret, so she wouldn’t get in trouble.

Keep reading

Critical Race Trove From California District Tells Students How To Use Witchcraft On People Who Say ‘All Lives Matter’

While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”

Colorblindness, Cops, and Curses

The page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the full range of CRT buzzwords, with links like Raising Race Conscious Children, the infamous 1619 Project, Anti-Racism for Beginners, and Social Identities and Systems of Oppression, among others. 

One link takes you to an “Anti-Racism Resource List,” which teaches about “white fragility” and claims that racism can only be perpetrated by white people. One of the “resources” provided was a Trevor Noah speech labeled “Why rioting makes sense,” followed by an unhinged anti-white rant from Sonya Renee Taylor, demanding that white people “throw your white body” on police officers and “put their bodies on the line for the purpose of justice.”

The list also addresses white people when it says, “We are socialized into white supremacy from the moment we are born” before going on to say “It is about completely dismantling how you see yourself and how you see the world, so that you can dismantle … white supremacy.”

Samuel Martin graduated from CUHSD’s Branham High School in 2019 and was appalled by the district’s actions. He told The Federalist, “The idea that white students must ‘dismantle themselves’ in the context of their personality is cultish. Not only is it cultish, but it is deliberate in that this school system wants its’ white students to hate themselves. Do these people honestly think that drilling racial identitarianism into childrens’ heads from a young age is going to make them less racist?”

CUHSD also links to the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide, specifically their section labeled “high school,” which itself includes 45 different texts. Amid a wide variety of CRT inspired assignments is a document that includes writing prompts on police brutality and racist violence. 

One section titled “Hex” tells the reader, “Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration.” It becomes increasingly deranged, suggesting that those who say “all lives matter” or commit “microaggressions,” should be targeted. “Write your own hex poem, cursing that person,” it instructs. 

When asked her thoughts on the document that instructed K-12 students to use witchcraft on political opponents, Branham teacher Meredith Allen told The Federalist she hasn’t read the documents her district recommends, so she “can’t comment,” but that she is generally “opposed to the ‘all lives matter’ message.”

Keep reading

House Democrats Block GOP Effort to Codify Parents’ Bill of Rights

Parental oversight of their kids’ education shouldn’t be a complicated or divisive issue, but — as statewide elections in Virginia last month showed — parents’ rights have become a partisan wedge as Democrats seek to keep America’s families from having a role in what their children are learning.

To preserve parents’ ability to keep tabs on what’s going on in schools and protect their ability to get critical information about the people to whom they entrust their children, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy drafted the Parents’ Bill of Rights with Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Julia Letlow (R-LA), Burgess Owens (R-UT), and Jim Banks (R-IN).

The House GOP’s proposal is simple: Parents should have the right to review their school’s curriculum and reading materials, to be heard, to see school budget and spending, to protect their child’s privacy, and to be updated on any violent activity at school.

While the ideas in the Parents’ Bill of Rights are straightforward and seemingly common sense, Democrats don’t want such rights protected under federal law. So, House Republicans led by Rep. Letlow put Democrats’ opposition to parental rights into the congressional record.

Keep reading

Minnesota Public School District Tried To Charge Concerned Parents More Than $900,000 For Records

A public school district in Minnesota told a law firm representing concerned parents that it could cost upwards of $901,121.15 to complete a government records request, according to communications obtained by the Daily Caller.

An attorney at Mohrman, Kaardal, & Erickson in Minneapolis sent a Government Data Practices Act Request to the interim superintendent at Rochester Public School District in Minnesota on Sept. 20. The request was made on behalf of “Equality in Education,” a concerned parents association.

The request asked the Rochester Public School District to release information on the development of curriculum, conferences, or seminars for teachers and students related to “equity and social justice topics often referred to as Critical Race Theory.”

The request called for records dating back to Jan. 2020 in elementary, middle, and high school, according to the Mohrman, Kaardal, & Erickson letter. Specific words that the group was concerned about included “equity, social justice, cultural competency, race, intersectionality, or CRT.” Many of these concepts are linked to the core tenets of Critical Race Theory.

Keep reading

Canadian School District Cancels Speech by ISIS Rape Survivor, Nobel Winner Due to ‘Islamophobia’ Fears

A woman who lived through kidnapping and sexual slavery at the hands of ISIS had an event cancelled by a Canadian school board due to fears of “Islamophobia.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Nadia Murad was scheduled to visit with students from 600 different schools to speak about her upcoming book, “The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity,” which documents the horrific treatment she suffered from ISIS but was told by the Toronto School District that her event could not be held because it could “foster Islamophobia”, according to the Telegraph.

The decision to cancel the event was made by Toronto School Board Superintendent Helen Fisher, who argued that the book could be viewed as offensive to Muslims. The Toronto District School Board is Canada’s largest, and the fourth largest in North America.

Murad’s book tells how she escaped the Islamic State after being taken from her home and sold into sexual slavery where she was raped and tortured at the age of 14.

Keep reading

Armed Agents in Texas School District Arrest Concerned Parents in Their Own Homes

The Round Rock Independent School District (RRISD) in Texas is using its own armed agents to arrest parents who speak out against the school board’s policies, according to Christopher Rufo in the City Journal.

Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said:

The battle lines are clear: on one side, the Biden administration, public school bureaucrats, and their armed agents; on the other, parents and families who oppose school closures, mask mandates, critical race theory and corruption. Public school officials have demonstrated a willingness to use police power to silence and intimidate their opponents.

Two fathers, Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark, had spoken out against the school board’s “alleged corruption and school officials’ hostility toward parents.” In August, while “produc[ing] evidence that the board had covered up an alleged assault by the superintendent, Hafedh Azaiez, against a mistress,” Story, a minister, was cut off midsentence as Azaiez ordered armed officers to remove him from the premises, according to Chronicles Magazine.

Keep reading

CRT Whistleblower Banned From School Because Staff Have “Clinical Anxiety” Over Working With Him

Tony Kinnett, A public school administrator in Indiana, exposed that critical race theory is being taught in public schools.

According to Kinnett, what is being taught “suggests to all of our students who aren’t black or brown that they are responsible for centuries of horrible oppression that the United States has built.”

He added, “we do have critical race theory in how we teach.”

Now, he’s being punished.

Fox News reported:

A public school administrator in Indiana went viral after posting a video explaining that Indiana schools are teaching Critical Race Theory and intentionally deceiving concerned parents about whether or not their children are being subjected to it.

“When we tell you that our schools aren’t teaching Critical Race Theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection,” Indianapolis district science coordinator, instructional coach, and administrator Tony Kinnett posted on Twitter Thursday.

Kinnett explained that he is an administrator in the largest school district in Indiana which means he is present in “dozens of classrooms a week” so he “sees exactly what we are teaching our students.”

“We don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards per se,” Kinnett said. “We do have Critical Race Theory in how we teach.”

Kinnett continued, “We tell our teachers to treat our students differently based on color. We tell our students every problem is a result of ‘white men’ and that everything Western Civilization built is racist. Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy. Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in ‘Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.’”

For exposing this he has been placed on leave and denied access to the school email and all buildings.

Keep reading