2021 Medley #6 – We Slide into Superstition and Darkness | Live Long and Prosper

2021 Medley #6 – We Slide into Superstition and Darkness | Live Long and Prosper

2021 Medley #6 – We Slide into Superstition and Darkness

MASK MISINFORMATION

N.J. school nurse fails science, experts say, in comments about face masks.

Sadly, this nurse at the center of this article has failed to keep up with the science she (should have) learned in nursing school.

One of the arguments Nurse Pein gives for being against masks is that it causes damage to the mental health of children. More first-graders are suffering from anxiety and depression, she claims. She blames the masks but fails science in at least two ways.

Science lesson #1

First, her conclusion is based on a small sample size, just one school. Any good scientist will tell you that a large enough sample size is necessary before concluding that a hypothesis is correct. Small samples increase the margin of error and reduce the confidence level. Are the first-graders in her school representative of all the first-graders in the state…the country…the world? Obviously not. Perhaps there’s something happening in her community that is causing stress among the population of young children — something like a CONTINUE READING: 2021 Medley #6 – We Slide into Superstition and Darkness | Live Long and Prosper

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs

There is sadly no mystery about the damage befalling public schools when private school tuition vouchers are expanded: Vouchers suck millions of essential dollars out of state and local public school budgets. Usually state legislatures start with a small program and then, several years later, explode the number of students eligible and the size of each voucher. Even though we know that aggregate standardized test scores reflect primarily a school district’s economic level and are a flawed measure of school quality, voucher proponents regularly market their new product as an escape for the poorest children from so-called “failing” schools.

Vouchers originally started in two of the nation’s school districts that serve concentrations of poor children: Milwaukee and Cleveland. But in 2021, we are watching a new phase of nationwide growth and expansion of vouchers.

In 2017, economist Gordon Lafer explained: “From 2011 to 2015, eighteen states established some form of voucher program. Vouchers are typically introduced as a limited, targeted intervention aimed at helping the neediest families but then expanded gradually to cover the general population. The country’s oldest voucher program was established in Milwaukee in 1990 and was restricted to poor children in failing schools and capped at a limited number of participants. In 2011, Governor Walker removed the cap, raised the income eligibility threshold, and expanded the program to include students in suburban counties. In 2013 the program was expanded yet again, this time to cover the entire state. Indiana and Ohio were CONTINUE READING: Lots of State Legislatures Are Launching New or Expanding Older School Voucher Programs | janresseger

Rethinking JFK’s “Ask not…..” | The Merrow Report

Rethinking JFK’s “Ask not…..” | The Merrow Report

Rethinking JFK’s “Ask not…..”

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”  John F. Kennedy issued that stirring challenge in his inaugural address sixty years ago, in January, 1961.  His words tapped into a wellspring of idealism and inspired many young Americans to join the Peace Corps or get otherwise involved in efforts to ‘improve the world around them.’

Sixty years later, the idea of national service is in the air.  Just over a year ago the non-partisan National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, which Congress created in 2017, issued its report, “Inspired to Serve,” and on the first Sunday of this month The New York Times devoted its lead editorial to the subject: “A Call to National Service”.  

In addition to reading reports and editorials about national service, I’ve also spoken with a few dozen of its supporters in the past two weeks, and nearly all of them believe that something must be done to pull our badly fractured country together.  National service just might do that, some of them argue cogently and persuasively. And, they say, it must be required because time is running out on our democracy.

That’s the all-important question: Should national service be mandatory? Should every citizen between the ages of 18-30 be required to spend two years in some sort of national service, whether military or otherwise?  

After all, the argument goes, Americans have rights and responsibilities, and shirking CONTINUE READING: Rethinking JFK’s “Ask not…..” | The Merrow Report

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Guest Post - HCC and SPS

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Guest Post - HCC and SPS

Guest Post - HCC and SPS

Editor’s note: I’m happy to publish any essays about SPS or public education in general. This one is from Megan Hazen who has three children in Seattle Schools.

Last Tuesday the Seattle School board passed an amendment to board policy 2190, which governs how Highly Capable (HC) students are served in Seattle. These students have demonstrated an atypical cognitive capacity to learn academic subjects quickly and deeply. State law says that basic education for these students includes specific adaptations from general education programming. The foundation of the state law is research and scientific understanding about the variance in human learning as well as recognition that students who learn atypically must be specifically served atypically in order to be served at all.

The changes to policy 2190 reflect a multi-year effort on the part of SPS to change the HC service model, but this specific step (which removes the guarantees of the old policy) is highly contentious. The proponents will claim that they need these changes to address the racism visible in the current service model, while the opponents claim that they need to retain the current model in order to get any service at all. Watching the debate is like watching two trains speeding towards each other, but on different tracks. There is no hope they will ever meet in the middle because they are holding different arguments.

The proponent side of the argument recognizes visible racist inequity. They appear to believe that they can solve the problems by treating the symptoms - take away the current model and you will take away the problem. The arguments for the changes all focus on historical barriers to access, not on the CONTINUE READING: Seattle Schools Community Forum: Guest Post - HCC and SPS

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland com

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland.com

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one

By Other Voices

As a student at a reputedly failing school, I will say emphatically that our public schools deserve support. As we look to determine the future of education, we must take a step back and decide what we want out of the system. There is more to education than an ill-conceived system of state testing. Public education exists to instill republican virtues in our people. We need this now more than ever.

Public schools have been branded as failing and stripped of funding by bizarre school-choice schemes. If a man has a broken leg, you don’t get him walking again by breaking the other leg. EdChoice, under the pretense of rescuing students from failing schools, has instead defunded those same schools rather than supporting vouchers directly. Our lawmakers must consider: If we focused instead on making meaningful improvements to the public education system which has served our state so well, would there be a need for EdChoice?

Visit Cleveland Heights High School. It is not failing. Nor is it perfect, for the vouchers have made sure of that. It is time that America rediscovers its republican virtues, the source of our strength, and the schools which gave them to us.

Kenji Sakaie,

Public schools deserve your support. I know. I attend one. - cleveland.com

Civic Leaders Fund Their Own Interests in AD54’s Special Election – redqueeninla

Civic Leaders Fund Their Own Interests in AD54’s Special Election – redqueeninla

Civic Leaders Fund Their Own Interests in AD54’s Special Election

There’s a political newcomer in AD54 (extending across eastern West-LA to western South-LA) who has burst on the scene with startling presence. Gregarious and appealing, Isaac Bryan has a hard luck story that scans like the Parable of the Prodigal Son of modern society, ready to make up for former academic and behavioral lapses with his personal charisma and gilded fluency in issues of social justice.

But if Mr Bryan is society’s prodigal son, then who is conferring the proverbial inheritance? It is Los Angeles’ power-elite. They have anointed his candidacy, and bestowed, along with their blessing, sufficient money to backfill the void of Bryan’s limited political history with mountains of glossy mailers and a tsunami of communications via public airwaves. A political neophyte with neither experience nor a functional vision for crafting legislation, his fallback is a great series of endorsements that mostly just reflect the might of his economic base: the establishment itself.

Following is the mandated reporting of donations organized for the voter to follow this money-trail yourself.

The donor-framework that characterizes this campaign is present from its outset (figure 1). Donations in the first two days (netting 6% of the total to date) engaged many of LA’s modern City Engineers:  the machine-politicians the Ridley-Thomas’ (both), the school system’s venture-capitalist superintendent Beutner, philanthropy-sourced dollars from high-tech (Netflix) and the film industry CONTINUE READING: Civic Leaders Fund Their Own Interests in AD54’s Special Election – redqueeninla

NewBlackMan (in Exile) TODAY #BLM #BLACKLIVESMATTER

 NewBlackMan (in Exile)

NewBlackMan (in Exile) TODAY

Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK WITH NEWBLACKMAN (IN EXILE) -

http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2021/05/this-week-with-newblackman-in-exile-blm_8.html

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Invisible Blackness – Interview with Terrace Martin

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 NewBlackMan (in Exile)