Education Issues - Actions / Reactions
- Thread starter GURPS
- Start date
N.J. school district will close before solar eclipse due to ‘concern’ about kids looking at the sun
Livingston schools will close early on April 8 to avoid any danger to students and families from the solar eclipse, according to a letter Superintendent Matthew J. Block sent home to families Wednesday.
The Essex County school district’s four schools will dismiss at noon or 12:45 p.m., hours before the eclipse, so students are not tempted to look directly at the sun without protective eyewear during their usual dismissal time, the superintendent said.
“Since the eclipse will occur during our regularly scheduled school dismissal times, many of our students would be outside and unsupervised during the eclipse,” Block wrote. “Unless children are properly supervised, they could be drawn to look at the eclipse, and would likely do so that day at dismissal. Without the proper equipment, this can cause damage to their eyes.”
The decision to close schools early got mixed reviews among some parents on social media.
WTAF happened to EDUCATION
Did a lawyer talk to them .? Leave school normal time kids can look. Any eye damage gets blamed on the school. If the kids do it from home its the parents problem.
Teacher Called Into Principal's Office After Refusing To Give Out Her Personal Address To A Student's Parents
“No joke. A parent wanted to send me a graduation announcement for their kid, which is awesome… I genuinely think their kid is freaking amazing,” this teacher wrote. “However, I told them to just send it to the school and I’ll get it.”
While she wanted to celebrate this student and receive the announcement, she wasn’t comfortable giving out her personal address — a completely valid boundary for a teacher to have. A corporate professional at a desk job wouldn’t be required to give out their address to a client or a co-worker, right?
Despite the seemingly clear boundary, the parents pushed back against this teacher's refusal. “They said they felt like I was calling them a stalker or a danger.”
While their anger was misguided, the parents' ire is exactly why she created the boundary in the first place.
California's Math Framework (CMF) has been adopted in most of the state's 950 school districts. And the one person most responsible for writing and pushing the framework, Jo Boaler, has been the target of a 100-page anonymous complaint that she misrepresented dozens of citations that underpin her research.
The CMF is a series of policy and curriculum "suggestions" that are designed to bring "equity" to the math scores of minority students.
Some of Boaler's outrageous suggestions already adopted are almost beyond belief. Julia Steinberg has listed a few in The Free Press.
Also, "letter grades will be discouraged in favor of “standards-based assessments.” It's not very clear what "standards-based assessments" are, but it sure sounds academic and harmless, right?
The worst of it boggles logic and reason.
I couldn't close my mouth for a few seconds after reading that. "The board’s overriding concern is not education or mathematical excellence, but minimizing racial inequity.," wrote Steinberg.
These are some of Boaler's grand ideas to "reform" education. And, as it turns out, she's a Grade-A charlatan based on another complaint filed in 2006.
Pirate Wires:
Shortly after the complaint went public, Boaler left the U.S. to teach in Great Britain where they're even more fanatical about "equity."
The CMF is a series of policy and curriculum "suggestions" that are designed to bring "equity" to the math scores of minority students.
Some of Boaler's outrageous suggestions already adopted are almost beyond belief. Julia Steinberg has listed a few in The Free Press.
- Most students won’t learn algebra until high school. In the past, when that was expected of middle schoolers, the CMF tells us, “success for many students was undermined.”
- This means calculus will mostly be verboten because students can’t take calculus “unless they have taken a high school algebra course or Mathematics I in middle school.”
- “Detracking” (ending advanced courses) will be the law of the land until high school; students will be urged to “take the same rich mathematics courses in kindergarten through eighth grade.”
Also, "letter grades will be discouraged in favor of “standards-based assessments.” It's not very clear what "standards-based assessments" are, but it sure sounds academic and harmless, right?
The worst of it boggles logic and reason.
- Lessons will foreground “equity” at the expense of teaching math basics like addition and subtraction. “Under the framework, the range of student backgrounds, learning differences, and perspectives, taken collectively, are seen as an instructional asset that can be used to launch and support all students in a deep and shared exploration of the same context and open task,” the CMF continues. It adds that “learning is not just a matter of gaining new knowledge—it is also about growth and identity development.”
I couldn't close my mouth for a few seconds after reading that. "The board’s overriding concern is not education or mathematical excellence, but minimizing racial inequity.," wrote Steinberg.
These are some of Boaler's grand ideas to "reform" education. And, as it turns out, she's a Grade-A charlatan based on another complaint filed in 2006.
Pirate Wires:
Shortly after the complaint went public, Boaler left the U.S. to teach in Great Britain where they're even more fanatical about "equity."
‘White Supremacy’ Is Social Justice™ Code For ‘Economic and Social Success'
In state college, I declared sociology a minor and enrolled in many sociology courses on the false assumption that they would be teaching sociology. Instead, what I discovered was a veritable viper’s den of aged (mostly white) lesbians with peace medallion necklaces and subtle yet perceptible facial hair on the warpath against men, straights, Christians, and, above all, the whites.
In one particularly egregious propaganda course that had the ironic and unintended effect of turning me off from the Social Justice™ left for all eternity, “Race, Class, and Gender Inequality,” we were treated to a module called “The Model Minority Myth,” which centered around the premise that Asians are held up by white supremacists — a category, by the way, that in Social Justice™ ideological canon definitionally includes all white people, no matter how far left, which makes escaping from the designation impossible by design — as a “model minority” to browbeat other minorities and assuage their guilt as white supremacists.
Via Time (emphasis added):
“Debunking” the ”Model Minority Myth” is a clumsy and self-contradictory rhetorical solution to the problem that Asians in America have long posed to the “white supremacy” narrative: namely, that they are more successful by every possible metric than their white counterparts — which would appear an odd anomaly, perhaps, in a nation founded on white supremacy.
Asians:
- Make more money on average than white people by $25,000/year per capita
- Earn higher education on average than white people
- Go to prison less often on average than white people
- Are victimized by crime on average less often than white people
- Experience drug addiction and homelessness on average less often than white people
Accordingly, because of their objective, measurable success, they must be turned into unwitting tools of “white supremacy” in the service of keeping other minorities down.
(Note that minorities are never granted any agency; they are always objects used in this way or that way by whites, even when they outperform whites.)
Student Argues for Equity-Oriented Solutions that Reevaluate How Hard STEM Classes Are
OK, so this is just a dumb Princeton student writing this in the school paper, but we've gone on and on about Common Core math and "algebra equity": A few years back, Seattle’s public schools adopted a math curriculum that looks at things like “power and oppression” and “resistance.” In 2021, California endeavored to do away with “white supremacy culture” in the mathematics classroom. That same year, Virginia was moving to end all advanced math classes before 11th grade as part of its “equity-focused plan.” All students would take the same math courses for two years before being allowed to advance. USA TODAY did a piece on the "controversial" trend of inclusive instruction.
This Princeton student argues that the university's STEM courses are "inequitable" and that the level of academic vigor be equal.
Different levels of student preparation? Weren't all these kids accepted by the same university? Obviously, they have an aptitude for math. Or maybe not.
Harvard cited a study by Opportunity Insights that showed that standardized tests were much better at predicting success for poor and minority students than high school grades alone.
“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, said in a statement.
“In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range,” she added.
CalTech said in its statement that requiring standardized test scores reaffirmed the school’s “commitment as a community of scientists and engineers to using all relevant data in its decision-making processes.”
“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” Hopi Hoekstra, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, said in a statement.
“In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range,” she added.
CalTech said in its statement that requiring standardized test scores reaffirmed the school’s “commitment as a community of scientists and engineers to using all relevant data in its decision-making processes.”
Dumbing Down Education In The Name Of ‘Decolonization’
Anyway, a little over a year ago there was an in-depth column in The Spectator about this movement to discredit and undermine serious academic disciplines, especially math. It was written by John Armstrong, who teaches at King’s College London and previously taught at Oxford. He’s an actual mathematician with actual credentials. And he summed up the problem with this whole push to “decolonize” math pretty simply.
So what do these activists mean when they say they want to “decolonize” math, given that the entire idea of de-colonizing math is completely incoherent? The Arabs were colonizers, too. And why are Australians, of all people, so interested in promoting this idea?
One possibility is that by some estimates, as the Twitter account I/o points out, aboriginal Australians happen to have, on average, the second lowest IQ out of any demographic group on the planet. That’s the sort of thing that’s supposed to be unsayable, but it’s impossible to talk about certain groups struggling academically without bringing up the intellectual elephant in the room. There might be a reason why there aren’t many Aboriginals working at NASA. It’s an important point because it means that decolonization, practically speaking, entails dumbing down these subjects or destroying them altogether.
Mainly we see with the “decolonization” agenda the embarrassment that liberal Westerners feel about the fact that their ancestors were far more advanced — in just about every way, and by every available measure — than the native people they conquered. The liberal Westerner is constantly looking for ways to even out the score. And we’re seeing that more and more in this country as well.
The once-respected Nature magazine, for example, recently published an editorial (with no byline) that reads: “Why we have nothing to fear from the decolonization of mathematics.”
What’s amazing is that, if you read the whole editorial, you won’t actually find a definition of what “decolonization” means in this context. You won’t find anything close to a definition, actually. The most you’ll discover is that according to Nature, decolonization:
But as we just established, some cultures and civilizations did, indeed, advance science and mathematics more than others. Some of them were colonizers, and some of those colonizers were not white. And regardless, none of this has anything to do with mathematics. Maybe you can argue this belongs in some elective history course somewhere. But it has no place affecting courses on the fundamentals of mathematics, which is exactly what’s happening in this country.
Pittsburgh Public Schools, for example, recently announced a plan to make mathematics instruction more “equitable.” What does that mean? Watch:
It’s the same thing the Canadian teacher said in her TEDx talk. The goal is for everyone to feel like a mathematician, regardless of ability. None of this has anything to do with actually teaching math, of course, which is the point. Students can fail math courses — and they’ve been doing a lot of that in Pittsburgh. But it’s harder to fail a course that begins with the assumption that every student is gifted in mathematics, no matter what their test scores or actual mathematical aptitude might say.
Last edited:
Seattle high school teacher who believes men can have babies and mocked a student for identifying as straight is finally suspended for saying the October 7 Hamas attack was justified
- Ian Golash has been suspended after saying the actions of Hamas were justified
- The Seattle teacher was exposed by conservative group Accuracy in Media
- In social media posts, Golash also states that he is a communist
A Seattle high school teacher has been placed on leave after footage emerged of him agreeing that the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel was justified.
Ian Golash, the social studies department chair at Chief Sealth International High School, was placed on leave last week according to the district.
The move to have him suspended came after conservative advocacy group 'Accuracy in Media' exposed his social media posts outside of the school.
In a video clip released this month, Adam Guillette, the president of the group, asked Golash whether what happened to Israel in October was justified.
After considering his answer for a few seconds, the teacher responds, 'Yes', and later adds that: 'I think resistance against Israel is justified.'
'It was like the Stasi has come to my door': Woke Exeter University bangs on student's door and threatens him with expulsion after he is overheard saying... 'veganism is wrong'
A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying 'veganism is wrong' and 'gender fluidity is stupid' was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and 'transphobic'.
Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a 'behavioural contract' for the rest of his studies.
He was warned he could be expelled if the university thought he had done anything else wrong, and told by letter he had been found guilty of harassment.
Last night, critics condemned Mr Ivinson's punishment as an example of the 'insidious erosion' of free speech in the UK's academic institutions.