Posted on 08/06/2020 1:25:13 PM PDT by Kaslin
Politicizing public school instruction marks a disturbing new development that jeopardizes the welfare of kids. Our children need to go to school.
Like many places around the country, this has been a hot, lonely summer for kids in North Carolina. The governor shut down playgrounds, pools, and camp, nearly every activity that means summer to a child. But, hey, school was just around the corner — or so we hoped.
Even with the prospect of staggered entry and wearing masks, at least kids could look forward to a live teacher in a real classroom with actual books. No longer would they be limited to a strange beast called “online instruction.” You could hear children everywhere start to sharpen their pencils.
Then local teachers’ unions kicked into gear. One by one, they insisted the governor roll back his already-cautious plans to open public schools. One union has drawn the most backlash. Like teachers’ unions in Boston and Chicago, educators in Durham, North Carolina linked political demands to classroom reopenings.
This union saw the pandemic as an opportunity to “fight collectively for moratoriums on rent and mortgage, universal health care, and direct income support regardless of immigration status.” According to them, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just want to open schools to “protect wealth and big business.”
Politicizing public school instruction marks a disturbing new development that jeopardizes the welfare of children. Parents rely on public schools to focus on educating kids. Teachers’ unions break a sacred trust when they use children as tools to advance educators’ political ideology.
By now, we are only too aware of the limitations children face in trying to learn complex subject matter through a computer screen. The best estimates for children who receive average online instruction put them three to six months behind. As anyone who has taught children knows, that gap takes many more months of hard work to close. Some children never catch up. The average black or Hispanic student is roughly two years behind already. With inferior instruction or none at all, many students will give up.
The nation can expect to witness a big jump in the high school dropout rate. A large gap in education achievement translates into lost wages that can follow a person for life. The superintendent of Miami-Dade public schools summarized the cost of shuttering in-person instruction, saying, “The nation should be bracing itself for the biggest ever, precedent-setting, historic academic regression.” He was then speaking only of the two months lost in the spring. Who can calculate what another lost six to nine months will mean for this generation?
How dare educators invent hurdles such as providing socialized health care or dismantling systemic racism in order to open schools, when the actual human costs of absentee schooling are this stark?
The time has come to put a human face to what our children suffer in this shutdown. In a viral video called “Numb,” a Canadian teenager sits on her bed with a computer in her lap. The faint voices of friends she hasn’t seen in months echo in her head. She is alone, staring at the next school assignment on her screen. Her face melts into the quick succession of a hundred other faces, and suddenly you realize thousands of kids just like this one are sitting on their beds, staring into a screen, and going numb.
A Washington Post reporter covered the story of an autistic boy named Bobby in Fairfax, Virginia, one of the nation’s largest public school systems. After four months of looking at pixelated teachers, Bobby’s hard-won vocabulary had been cut in half. His mother reassured him he would be back in school soon. When the school announced it would be online in the fall, however, Bobby’s world fell apart.
“I’m used to society leaving us behind,” Bobby’s mother said. “I’m used to Bobby not being able to go to birthday parties. … But the school system has always been a place where I knew he was accepted.” This isn’t the case if Bobby can’t actually go to school.
Picture a 10-year-old girl living in a fragile home in a unsafe neighborhood. The space is cramped, and she has no computer. Her mother leaves each day to another part of town for a job she needs to keep, but her current boyfriend comes around, or maybe he lives there. Somehow, in this setting, a child is supposed to memorize multiplication tables, or tackle a book she finds difficult?
Can we fathom the number of children living in neglect or even abuse and what it means to them to have their one safe and caring place taken away? More than 90 percent of children who are abused suffer that abuse at the hands of a stressed-out or addicted parent — or a parent’s paramour. How would any of us fare locked inside an abusive home for months on end without school or even a playground to escape to?
This is a fraction of the human cost for children if their education is held hostage to teachers’ political desires. The real goal gets lost. Children need a setting they can count on with an in-the-flesh teacher bent on helping them learn to read or do quadratic equations or treat others with kindness and respect. The revolution will have to wait.
Whatever goal the left pursues, the battle cry of “safety” is the surefire way to advance their agenda. For instance, the LGBT lobby has long used spurious claims of potential child suicide or bullying as a way to silence opposition and further its aims.
So it is no surprise that “safety” seems to be the only risk that counts for opening schools. Durham educators have followed the national trend of insisting that COVID-19 transmission rates be “much lower than they are now.” Until the curve gets flat and stays flat, “remote learning should be the default,” they say.
Like much of life, however, we can’t eradicate risk in this picture. Studies show kids are in greater danger of dying from the seasonal flu than from COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends schools start in person under careful guidelines. Just how safe will we have to be in order to be declared safe enough to go about our lives and educate our children? As the safety goalposts move daily, suspicions rise.
If we are concerned about children’s overall well-being, eliminating risk cannot be the reigning criteria for opening schools. Our kids’ great-grandfathers scaled the cliffs of Omaha Beach under enemy fire. Surely, we can figure out how to space desks and wear masks and get kids to wash their hands. It is possible to lower the risk of transmission and still teach in a well-planned environment.
This practice of using children as a tool to accomplish adult desires is unfortunately not a new phenomenon. What’s novel here is using public school education as a means to accomplish political goals.
The education of our children cannot be held hostage to political goals or adult aspirations. Political battles should be settled in a voting booth or a civil court. Our children need to go to school, to interact in person with teachers and peers. The longer they languish in front of pixelated screens, the more stunted their own futures are likely to be. It’s time to put the education of our children first.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll out this morning found 60 percent of parents whose children normally attend school say it’s better to resume in-person classes later to make sure the risk of contracting the novel coronavirus is as low as possible.
If teacher’s really cared about kids, they wouldn’t be demanding that police be removed from schools.
Teachers are the pawns of activist Leftist Unions. No surprise here.
Those who are indoctrinating our kids are true believers, aka useful idiots. While the leftist elite are more aware that they are simply sowing chaos in an effort to unseat President Trump, the minions in the indoctrination trade believe the party line. Corona is a monster that should be avoided at all costs! Shut everything done, sacrifice whatever we must to contain this brutal killer of 0.03% of everyone who is infected!
If Teachers Won’t Teach, Follow Ronald Reagan’s Example and Fire Them
Townhall.com ^ | August 5, 2020 | Bob Barr
Posted on 8/5/2020, 10:17:41 AM by Kaslin
When 13,000 air traffic controllers walked off the job in August 1981, President Ronald Reagan had this to say: “Tell them when the strike’s over, they don’t have any jobs.” The media, not yet fully familiar with the seriousness with which Reagan intended to govern, scoffed at the president’s threat. But it was not a bluff. Two days later, when more than 11,000 controllers refused to come back, Reagan fired them all. It was a powerful move, and demonstrated to the entire country that essential public employees serve the public, not union bosses. America’s public school teachers should be reminded of this fact.
With thousands of teachers across the country currently protesting a return to the classroom because of COVID fears, Reagan’s example is particularly relevant. Like air traffic controllers, teachers sign employment contracts. While air traffic controllers contract with the federal government and teachers with local school districts, the principle is the same: perform the duties for which you were hired, or be fired.
Teachers who refuse to teach in the setting for which they were hired – the classroom – need to stop acting like scared bunnies and grow up. If they truly are “essential” workers, as they remind us repeatedly, then they need to start behaving like other essential employees and get back to work.
Many businesses, unfortunately, have been forced by the government to shut down wholly or in part in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, and this is having a devastating effect on our national economy. Amidst this devastation, public schools in virtually every jurisdiction across the country ended the school year early after COVID hit our shores in March.
Unlike commercial businesses, however, the prolonged closure of schools has ramifications far beyond the economic. Moreover, educating children is a process that cannot be switched on and off like a production line; the damage to young minds that are allowed to lie fallow month after month, or which are presented with “virtual” learning in place of human-to-human interface, creates learning voids not easily replenished.
“Teaching” means, if anything, working with students as well as encouraging students to work with other students in a social setting for the purpose of learning essential skills and acquiring essential knowledge. “Virtual” teaching is not teaching at all; it is cinematography – nothing more than an adult (the “teacher”) speaking to a camera, with an audience of one (the “student”) at the end of the electronic transmission watching a screen. Raw information may be thus transmitted, but not true knowledge.
What many public school teachers and their union bosses at the National Education Association appear to be setting as the price for them to return to the classroom, is a guarantee that the environment will be 100% percent COVID-free at all times. Such a condition is, of course, impossible to meet and essentially allows the teachers to avoid a return to their job site for the foreseeable future.
Moreover, demanding a zero-risk premise for classroom teaching sends the message to students (and everyone else for that matter) that risk-avoidance is the highest and most desirable goal for society. This further erodes the principle on which America’s greatness heretofore has been premised – that society advances not by avoiding challenges, but by meeting and overcoming them.
There might perhaps be somewhat more compassion for the our-way-or-the-highway posture being taken by these public school teachers had they and their union not spent decades working to ensure that public education remained the only practical option for millions of families across America. Unionized teachers continue to vilify homeschooling and oppose providing taxpaying parents any meaningful ability to choose where to send their children to be educated.
No teacher should be forced to go into the classroom against their will. However, if local government leaders properly equip them with personal protective equipment and mandate reasonable protocols within the schools to minimize the risk of COVID, and if teachers and their unions then still refuse to teach in school, it is time to “pull a Reagan” and fire them. The money saved from thinning educational bloat of protesting teachers and useless district administrators with nothing to do, can be returned to parents who are struggling to pay for alternatives to ensure their children actually have a productive school year.
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it has never been about the children.
it has always been about the union.
shut them down.
educate with like minded parents. hold your own classes.
fire all the teachers
sell all the buildings
keep one teacher per grade
have them film each days lesson
kids watch online
all that money and govt building expenses, and people doing 15-20% of their workload, are gone
kids get better education and can claim they all get the same education as well
I am glad my kids are grown, so i don’t have to worry about that stuff.
They never do that, so you can forget about it. 20 kids per class is to much for them.
They care more about goldbricking. No work and a regular check. Teacher nirvana.
“When school children start paying union dues, that ‘s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
Albert Shanker, former teacher’s union boss
No students in class, no federal funds.
The problem will be solved the day after the first set of paycheck are distributed.
Simple: You’re paid to teach students in class. No work, no pay.
In my grade school days (late 1940s-early 1950s) 40 per class was more common than 30 and it was almost never as low as 20.
While in high school I watched my teachers go on strike in order to unionize. I also watched the quality of education in my school diminish almost immediately.
L8r
What are the parents afraid of? Their kid catching covid? Did they send their kid last year or the year before? Because there were a host of viruses running through our country those years, and some kids got colds. Flus. Stomach bugs. Why ever go to school, if there are any Contagious illnesses on the planet?
Kids who get sick from covid are tired, running a low fever, and not even doing much coughing. They rest and watch tv for a few days. Then they are back to normal.
Schools will open, but not because kids won’t get sick.
Schools will open because of the pressure.
Single parent homes (divorce and pre marital sex) and the dual income family (greed - daddy needs a Harley, mom needs a nice car too) dictate that the kids need to be stored some place during the day: hence the full time/all day school, before and after school programs, and summer camps. Parents provide sperm and egg and then children are institutionalized starting 6 weeks after birth.
The science will then always be invented to prove that formula is better than mothers milk (a story told a long time ago), how schools provide better socialization than homeschooling, or how Covid won’t be an issue even though stuffing kids in a school defies EVERY concept espoused by the experts that use: distance, time and shielding, as their argument to keeping people safe. Suddenly, some new constant is injected which changes everything, but only for schools, not a public beach, pool, etc. LOL
What a joke-
Ten years ago I compiled data for a GOP candidate for a local seat. He had sent a survey to all residents, and one question was the person’s career. Almost EVERY teacher who responded said they were in the business because they hardly had to do any work, got paid really well, and had summers off. Not even one of them mentioned helping children.
As a past-president of the American Federation of Teachers famously said, I’ll start caring about the children when they start paying dues.
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