MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘LAUSD’

It’s time to take seriously teachers’ refusal to teach – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on February 4, 2021

The reason why teachers can take this stand is that they’re still getting their paychecks.

Nevertheless, page three of the handout for the LAUSD says that Wednesday, February 3 is going to be “Trans-Affirming, Queer-Affirming, and Collective Value” day.  Elementary classrooms are encouraged to do a “woke read aloud: They, She, He: Easy as ABC,” to explore “gender stereotypes through role plays,” and to read It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A book about gender identity. 

This is not education; it’s indoctrination, and the teachers’ cowardice in the face of the Wuhan virus is the perfect opportunity to bring an end to this madness. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/its_time_to_take_seriously_teachers_refusal_to_teach.html

By Andrea Widburg

In Democrat-run cities across America, teachers are demanding priority access to vaccines and refusing to return to their classrooms.  The big fights are in Chicago, Montclair (New Jersey), and California, where the teachers are insisting on working only from home.  Other school systems have only partial in-class teaching (e.g., Texas, Florida, and New York).  Conservatives are reflexively pushing for a return to classroom teaching, but perhaps they should push in the other direction: let’s end public schools entirely.

Before I go any farther, I’d better apologize to those readers who are intelligent, dedicated teachers who do not think theirs is the hardest job in the world, that they receive the lowest salary of any employee ever, or that they are uniquely vulnerable to the Wuhan virus despite evidence that classrooms are not dangerous virus spreaders.  This post is not about you.  This post is about teachers who use their classrooms to indoctrinate the captive young people in their charge with leftist values.

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is engaged in an epic battle with the teachers’ union to force them back into schools. So far, the teachers are winning with remote “learning” extended for at least two more days — and with the City having backed down from its threat to lock computer teaching access for those teachers who don’t return to their classrooms.  In California, teachers’ unions are refusing to re-open schools until every single teacher is vaccinated.

The reason why teachers can take this stand is that they’re still getting their paychecks.  While non-government workers are desperate to get back on the job so that they can buy food and shelter their families, teachers keep getting their paychecks even as students languish at home, isolated, alienated, depressed, and suicidal.

Conservatives rightly resent what’s happening.  They support getting teachers back to work, but I’d like to suggest a different approach: shut down the public schools in these cities, give parents vouchers, and let the free market do its magic.  Some parents might homeschool; some might do learning pods; some might reinvigorate parochial schools or other religious academies.  The point is that parents would finally have a say in what their children are learning — and good teachers would find a broad variety of employment opportunities.

More than that, parents would have a say in preventing their students from being on the receiving end of leftist indoctrination.  For example, parents might have a say about the content of Black Lives Matter week at the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The LAUSD has on its website a colorful five-page graphic talking about what students should be learning from February 1 through 5, which is the “week of action” for “black lives matter at schools.”  It’s a dangerous thing to say nowadays, but I believe that all lives matter.  I also believe that, if I say one race matters without mentioning the others, I am impliedly saying that the others don’t, which is a sentiment I cannot support.  So, right off the bat, if my children were still in school, I would resent mightily having the BLM agenda — a purely Marxist concept that substitutes race for class — foisted on them.

It’s not just that, though.  What’s being taught through the BLM curriculum is the whole panoply of hard-left thought, which substitutes illusory restorative justice for the rule of law, makes race (something over which people have no control) the single most important thing about the individual, pushes kids into becoming political activists, and — most disturbingly — advances the transgender myth.

People who believe they are the opposite of their biological sex or that they can change sex with the phases of the moon are every bit as mentally ill as anorexics or others with body dysmorphia.  It’s a tragic condition that should be dealt with compassionately.  It should not be foisted as reality on young children.  That’s as bad as treating anorexics with diet pills and stomach-stapling.

Nevertheless, page three of the handout for the LAUSD says that Wednesday, February 3 is going to be “Trans-Affirming, Queer-Affirming, and Collective Value” day.  Elementary classrooms are encouraged to do a “woke read aloud: They, She, He: Easy as ABC,” to explore “gender stereotypes through role plays,” and to read It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A book about gender identity.  (By the way, have you noticed that all so-called transgender men invariably traffic in hyper-feminine gender stereotypes, along the lines of Marilyn Monroe?)

This is not education; it’s indoctrination, and the teachers’ cowardice in the face of the Wuhan virus is the perfect opportunity to bring an end to this madness.  Public schools have gotten too big and too political.  If Democrats could use the Wuhan virus to upend America, conservatives should be able to use it to strike down a toxic system that employs too many people more interested in advocacy than in education.

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Editorial: California can’t account for billions of education dollars

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

Expand that concept to a national level.

We are probably better off not knowing where that Kalifornia money went.

Safe rooms and Play Doh maybe.

Then think about what is taught. That is the scary part.

Government is the last thing we need in the education system.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/12/04/editorial-california-cant-account-for-billions-of-education-dollars/

By Stephen Frank

Want to waste tax dollars? Give it to your failed government schools. Want quality education? LAUSD is a holding action, no longer an education facility—so few graduate with real diploma’s earned. Now we find the government schools can not even keep accurate the money given to them…

Inexcusable that, six years after K-12 spending revamp, audit finds needy kids aren’t getting help they should

By Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Boards, 12/4/19   |

It’s been six years since California lawmakers revamped the state funding formula for local schools.

It was heralded by then-Gov. Jerry Brown as a way to simplify K-12 education spending and close the state’s achievement gap by giving more money to districts that disproportionately serve needy kids.

Since then, state spending on schools has increased about 50%. But, as state Auditor Elaine Howle explained in a troubling report last month, there is no way to track whether money is being spent as it should.

School officials across California have co-mingled billions of dollars of state money that was supposed to be used for children who fall into one of three categories: English learners, low-income or in foster care.

Howle’s findings confirm what critics have been saying for years: Rather than specifically helping needy kids, the money has simply been used to boost general spending.

That partially explains why California students’ test scores continue lagging the national average and the state has failed to close the achievement gap that divides along racial and economic lines.

If California has any hope of narrowing that divide, legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom should require accountability for the $63 billion of state money currently spent annually on K-12 education.

It’s time to end this reckless spending. As we enter the state budget cycle for the 2020-21 fiscal year, lawmakers must stop doling out money without a meaningful tracking system for how it’s spent.

Brown’s original plan made sense. State spending for schools had become far too complicated, with more than 110 special “categorical” programs that had different funding and eligibility requirements.

The plan was to eliminate the categorical programs and give local school districts more control over the money. Hence, the Local Control Funding Formula was created.

LCFF is pretty simple. School districts receive a base amount determined by students’ attendance figures and grade levels. In addition, they receive a supplemental 20% for students falling into one of the three needy categories. And in districts with concentrations of more than 55% needy students, per-pupil funding increases 50% for each kid beyond the 55% threshold.

The so-called supplemental and concentration funding is supposed to be spent to provide additional help for those targeted children. But when Howle audited a sample of three school districts — Oakland, Clovis and San Diego — only Clovis tracked how the money was spent.

That’s because there are no state regulations to ensure districts separately account for the extra funds. Moreover, if the districts don’t spend the money on those needy students the year they receive the funds, they can spend it on anything the following year.

Hence, there are no rules to ensure Brown’s law is being followed. Indeed, while he was in office, Brown repeatedly resisted such a requirement. Consequently, there is no way to determine whether the additional funding is producing measurable student performance improvements.

The idea behind LCFF was to provide more local control. Parents were supposed have input into how the money is spent — something that’s meaningless if they’re not provided useful data — and school districts were supposed to be freed from the restrictions of hundreds of categorical spending programs.

But LCFF was never intended to be a giveaway of funds without obligations. Our neediest students were supposed to be better served. There’s no way to know whether that’s happened.

The lack of accountability — for how the money is spent and whether it’s producing results — is no longer acceptable.

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teachers

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