Garry Trudeau summed up one of the problems that teachers face
today in the Doonesbury strip of May 22, 2022.
He mentions parent-activist Linda Tarr, but there is no such
person. However, there ARE people who would be considered to be
parent-activists, and they are a real problem for teachers.
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2022/05/22
Ideally, education of our children should be a partnership between parents and teachers. Parents have the responsibility to provide learning opportunities for their kids, and teachers build on that.
In 2021, the FOX network mentioned the phrase “critical race
theory” more than 2000 times. Due to its large audience, it attracted the
attention of conservatives who needed social issues to attract votes.
In his 2022 State of the State address, Governor Doug Ducey
said that we needed more critical thinking, and less critical race theory in
our schools. He also said we need to focus less on masks, and more on math.
Critical thinking, of course, comes from being exposed to a
wide variety of ideas, but the book bans proposed by Florida and other states
does exactly the opposite.
Adjusting for population, there have been a total of 303
COVID-19-related deaths for every 100,000 Americans nationwide. In Arizona,
deaths attributable to the coronavirus per capita are even more common than
they are nationwide. Across the state, 30,189 people have died from the
coronavirus, equal to about 421 deaths for every 100,000 people. Of all states
-- and Washington D.C. -- Arizona has the highest death rate per capita.
There have been over 1
million deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the United States -- and that number
continues to grow every day.
At the peak of the pandemic,
schools resorted to remote learning in order to minimize the spread of COVID.
When infection rates started to trend down, most schools mandated that masks
needed to be worn by students, teachers, and visitors.
The Federal government
provided funding to the states in order to fight the pandemic – but not all
governors used that money wisely
Governor Ducey threated to
withhold funding to schools that imposed mask mandates, a position that is
patently illegal.
You won’t find a lot of discussion about parent-activists in
mainstream media, but conservative newsletter Washington Examiner published an
opinion piece in January of this year.
Here’s some of the main ideas:
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In the early hours of Nov. 3, Republican Glenn Youngkin, now the
governor-elect of the commonwealth of Virginia, took to the stage at his
campaign election night watch party to promise a conservative renewal in
governance in a state that had moved to the left in recent years.
Youngkin’s victory over former governor and Democratic nominee
Terry McAuliffe was an unexpected upset and amounted to a political earthquake
in a state that had voted for President Joe Biden by a double-digit margin the
year prior, and it took place in Washington, D.C.’s backyard.
Youngkin’s victory, on a
platform featuring a vow to empower parents in public education, proved to be
the culminating achievement of a parental rights movement that was visible in
Virginia but also swept across the nation to Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, and
everywhere in between.
From the refusal of numerous
schools to reopen following the pandemic closures, the inclusion of critical
race theory and gender ideology in school curricula, the fight over mask
mandates, and the Loudoun County public school rape case, a wide breadth of
issues pertaining to education motivated a new kind of voter, turning the
Virginia race into an unexpected referendum on public education.
In addition to Youngkin’s Virginia victory, conservative and
Republican-backed candidates ousted
incumbents in school board elections all over the nation, ushering in
a new wave of candidates whose vows to keep schools open with no mask mandates
and to ban critical race theory proved to be a winning message.
But the most visible aspect of the parental activist movement,
and a defining image of local politics in 2021, was the use of public comment
periods at school board meetings.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/2021-the-year-of-the-parent-activist
**********************************************
Although I agree that parents should be involved with the
education of their children, the new era of the parent-activist has taken a
dangerous turn.
In June of 2021, a man was arrested at a school board meeting
in Virginia for disorderly conduct, and there have been arrests in other states
as well.
In Tucson last week, a 46-year-old woman stormed into her son’s
classroom and attacked her son’s teacher. When she picked up a chair to hit the
teacher, she also hit a 13-year-old student. She now faces three felony charges.
https://news.yahoo.com/man-arrested-school-board-meeting-190011578.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall
Although parents should have the right to voice their opinion
at school board meetings, there HAVE been cases where school board members have
received death threats, which prompted the National School Board Association (in
October of 2021) to ask the Biden administration for immediate assistance
… to protect our students, school board members, and educators who are
susceptible to acts of violence affecting interstate commerce because of
threats to their districts, families, and personal safety.”
The anger over CRT and mask mandates has little to do with either topic.
It’s all about getting votes.
Once upon a
time, school boards were sleepy backwaters of local government, where concerned
community members volunteered their time to debate things like budgets and
calendars.
Those
days seem long, long ago.
The change began with the coronavirus pandemic. For
more than a year, angry parents have crowded meetings to shout down mask
mandates or remote learning.
Now, the conversation has turned toward race, specifically
fears that school boards are introducing critical race theory to the
curriculum. Some conservative activists and politicians are using these worries
to drive
school board recalls and to rally their voters in statewide elections.
In 2021, Ballotpedia, a nonpartisan political
encyclopedia, said it had tracked 80 such efforts against 207 board members.
That’s the highest number since it began tracking in 2010. The parents then run
for the seats, and often
win.
Republicans see school board
races as a way to take back white suburban districts, which have shifted toward the Democrats in
the past eight years. In Wisconsin, a pivotal swing state that President Biden
won by just over 20,600 votes, critical race theory could be an important swing
issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/the-conservative-school-board-strategy.html
Recent efforts to attract votes include that banning of numerous math books in Florida and the banning of certain books. Florida’s reasoning is that they feel that they include references to Critical Race Theory.
Tennessee recently banned “Maus” “due to concerns about profanity and an image of female
nudity in its depiction of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust,”CNBC reports.
The Tucson MSA, Arizona, and the U.S. all have similar K-12 attendance rates for public versus private schools. In 2020, of the school-age children attending school in the U.S., 89.1% attended public schools while 10.9% attended private schools. The public-school attendance rate was slightly higher for Tucson (89.7%) and Arizona (91.2%).
Although both parents and students benefit from public education,
the greatest benefit is to society as a whole. However, many of our public officials
don’t like public schools, which is why they keep trying to expand the voucher
program. 24% of the schools in Arizona are charter schools – and they are not
as highly regulated as public schools
Beyond public and charter schools, parents also have the option
of home schooling or private education.
Regulations on home schooling vary by states, but only schools
in the Northeast have strict regulations. Some states have no regulations at
all.
For they parents who want a more religious, or a more
conservative curricula, private schools are also available- but they are
expensive.
My Catholic grade school in Minnesota charges over $5000 a year per student for parishioners, and nearly $7000 a year for non-parishioners.
There WAS a time when the public school system was considered to
be the best in the world – but that is no longer true.
One big difference is how its teachers are treated. In Finland
and South Korea, teachers are held in the same regard as doctors.
https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2016/12/are-finns-really-smarter-than-us.html
Nationwide, starting teacher salaries range from a high of over $50,000 to a low of $32,000 , In Arizona, the starting salary for a teacher is $39,057, which is why 33% of the teaching positions in the state are not filled.
If you lived in Seattle, you can make the same salary working at Dick’s Drive-In, and you would not have to grade papers OR attend school board meetings.
https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.html
The big difference in states is the MAXIMUM salary in that state. In Arizona, that number if $63,000, but 11 states have maximum salaries in excess of $80,000.
Turning Point Action, which organized Trump’s visit to Phoenix
in July of 2021 is actively involved in remaking school boards to its liking.
It operated Students for Trump in the 2020 election.
Turning Point Action was started by a young man named Charlie
Kirk in July of 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Point_Action
Although things look bleak for education in this country,
there ARE some things that we can do to make it better.
If you have the stomach for it, run for an open school board seat.
The other option, of course, is to vote for people who believe in public
education. School boards DO need to listen to the views of parents, but they
still need to do the right thing for the students – and that’s not always going
to be popular with parents.
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