It does, however, damage children.
School shutdowns in Japan last year did not prevent the spread of coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic, a new study finds.
Researchers from the U.S. and Japan compared municipalities that closed schools in spring 2020 with schools that did not.
They found there was no differences in the number of Covid cases per 100,000 between the two groups of municipalities.
Even Mequon’s school district is lost. It’s time to defund government education.
A recall effort against four Mequon-Thiensville School Board members failed to unseat any incumbents Tuesday, a major loss for recall organizers who had raised nearly $50,000 and gained national attention in their months long pursuit.
Each of the incumbents won over 58% of the votes in their races, according to unofficial results posted by the district Tuesday.
The election marks the 16th failed recall effort against school board members in Wisconsin since the pandemic began, with many of the recall organizers citing frustration with pandemic safety measures.
A Virginia mother told a local school board last week that her six year-old daughter had been told she was ‘born evil’ for being white during a history lesson in scandal-hit Loudoun County.
The unidentified woman claims she moved her daughter out of the district because of the school curriculum.
She blamed former Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Eric Williams; his successor, Dr. Scott Ziegler, and the school board for the alleged slur.
‘We had specifically moved them out of LCPS due to the swift and uncompromising political agenda of Superintendents Williams, Ziegler, and the school board had forced upon us,’ the mother said.
‘First, it was in the early spring of 2020 when my six-year-old somberly came to me and asked me if she was born evil because she was a white person.
‘Something she learned in a history lesson at school.’
The woman continued: ‘Then, you kept the schools closed for a year-and-a-half, despite the science indicating it was safe for kids to return.
I do think that CRT is an interesting, if wrong, thesis to study in higher education. But when it is taught by hack teachers to children who have not yet developed critical thinking skills, it is a travesty.
It isn’t Youngkin using schools as a political weapon. Leftists have been doing that for years. They are just upset that people are pushing back.
Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe laid into Youngkin with relish during an appearance alongside President Joe Biden on Tuesday in the vast Virginia suburbs, which have transformed what was formerly a reliably conservative southern state into a Democratic bastion.
“What bothers me daily is that Glenn Youngkin uses education to divide Virginia. He wants to pit parents against parents, parents against teachers. He wants to bring his personal culture wars into our classrooms,”
Here is my column that ran in the Washington County Daily News on Tuesday:
The outrage that so many parents and community members are feeling is the realization that many of our government schools no longer consider themselves accountable to the people.
Throughout Wisconsin, and the rest of America, we are witnessing an eruption of outrage and activism by parents who are angry with their local school districts and the people who run them for indoctrinating children with critical race theory. This latest advancement of Marxism in our schools, however, is only the latest manifestation of a much deeper issue.
The real source of the outrage is our collective realization that the people who run our government schools no longer consider themselves accountable to the communities they are supposed to serve. Too many of our school administrators, teachers, and board members just want parents to shut up, pay their exorbitant taxes, and blindly accept what their children are being taught. It is an all-out assault on small “r” republicanism. When the pandemic began and we knew so little about the latest virus, parents wholeheartedly supported their local government schools as they made difficult decisions in what everyone thought was the best interest of the children.
Eighteen months later, we know much more about the virus, the minimal risk to children, and the incredible damage that many of the virus mitigation methods do to children. Despite this, too many schools have persisted in damaging children despite the clear science and the protestations of parents. The refusal of government schools to follow their community’s direction on virus mitigation was a shock for many parents. The entire purpose of having an elected board of community members run our government schools is so that the school district will reflect the collective will of the local community. Not only have many school districts refused to acquiesce to that collective will, school administrators, teachers unions, and the board members who serve them have treated the community with contempt for daring to challenge the mental and moral supremacy of officialdom.
The infusion of CRT into the curriculum of many schools was another revelation for parents. CRT is a postmodern radical racist ideology that has its roots in the Marxist dogma of dividing people by arbitrary characteristics. Marx divided people by economic class. CRT divides people by race. In both cases, they eschew the rights and liberties of individuals in favor of collective reward or punishment. They are ideologies that erode individualism as a means to subjugation.
CRT put a name to something that has been happening in too many of our government schools for some time. Now that parents are objecting and the term “CRT” has become politically toxic, some schools are changing the name to “social emotional learning,” “culturally responsive teaching,” or just infusing the ideology throughout the curriculum without assigning it a name. Fortunately, many parents are already onto the game and are trying to hold their local school board accountable.
In Mequon, an intrepid band of parents rallied the community to recall four members of the School Board who have been ignoring the community on issues from virus mitigation to the efforts to radicalize the children through the curriculum. Importantly, the parents in Mequon, now awakened, are pointing out that while the school board and administrators have been focused on botched virus responses, radical curriculum, and shaming parents, the school district’s education performance has been declining for years. This is true of almost every government school district in Wisconsin. While school administrators and board members focus on turning out a generation of woke radicals to fuel the leftist revolution, parents just want educated kids who are equipped to go get their American dream.
The outrage that so many parents and community members are feeling is the realization that many of our government schools no longer consider themselves accountable to the people. They consider themselves to be autonomous institutions whose purpose is to transform the bigoted, inequitable, individualistic society around them. Their hubris fuels their derision of the people they are supposed to be serving.
It is incredibly important that the people in Mequon and elsewhere reclaim their local government school boards for their communities. Education is the key to success for each child and every moment wasted is a moment taken from that child’s future. Teachers can model respect, dignity, and personal responsibility while teaching a full curriculum of reading, mathematics, economics, finance, civics, history, literature, geography, science, art, mechanics, technology, and all of the other subjects that compose a well-rounded education. Time is the most precious commodity a school has and there is not a moment to waste on divisive indoctrination.
Unless these parents are also forcing masking, distancing, etc. on their kids in every other aspect of life, I don’t see how they can even prove that their kid got COVID at school. But imagine what kind of hell schools will be if they become liable for every kid who catches any kind of illness in their walls.
The parents in Waukesha and Fall Creek each filed federal lawsuits against their respective school boards after their children tested positive for COVID-19. The lawsuits claim the children got sick after they were exposed to another sick child while in school, and blame their children’s’ illness on the districts’ lack of mitigation strategies.
Both cases are seeking an order to force the districts to comply with COVID-19 guidance from the CDC.
The lawsuits are being funded by the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC. The Super PAC and the brewery, which has politically branded beers, are owned by Kirk Bangstad, who ran unsuccessfully last November for the Assembly District 34 seat against incumbent Republican Rob Swearingen. He started a Super PAC in January targeting Republican federal and state officials.
That’s pretty much this guy’s message.
Parents have an important role in the education process, no doubt, but when it comes to what is being taught, that should be left up to elected and appointed professionals that have a background in education and actual experience with teaching. Just because a parent disagrees with something doesn’t make what they disagree with inappropriate for the classroom.
Parents tend to let their personal views cloud what they think should and should not be taught in schools. Being an educated person means that you are a well-rounded person. A well-rounded person learns about many different topics and perspectives.
Parents that are demanding to have a say in what is and isn’t taught need to think about the consequences of their demands.
At best, parents dictating what teachers teach could lead to dangerous inaccuracies in the many facets of education. At worst, it could poison our students’ minds with nonsensical dribble.
I’m heartened to see communities trying to take control of their schools back. I hope they are successful
But the issue that transformed Yoder, a stay-at-home mother, from a reliable voter to the kind of person who brings three young children to an evening campaign rally was not her Christian values or her pocketbook.
It was something even more personal, she said: what her children learn in school.
“The past year has revealed a ton to me,” Yoder, 41, said as she waited in this northern Virginia exurb for a speech by Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor. “The more I’ve listened and paid attention, the more that I see what’s happening in schools and on college campuses. And the stuff I see, I don’t want corrupting my children.”
Parents of high school students in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada have started a petition to remove a school official because of the classic heavy metal band Iron Maiden.
Close to 400 people have signed the Change.org petition to transfer Eden High School Principal Sharon Burns.
IHeartRadio reported that the petition was started by Debbi Lynn.
“As concerned parents with impressionable children at Eden High School in St. Catharines, Ontario, we are deeply disturbed that the principal assigned to the school blatantly showed Satanic symbols and her allegiance to Satanic practices on her public social media platforms where all the students can see them under @edenprincipal (not her personal account),” the petition said.
On Friday, an update on the petition said they didn’t want to remove Burns because of her love for Iron Maiden but because of “openly displaying her OWN handmade sign with the 666 clearly displayed on it.”
The number 666 is used to represent the devil, antichrist, or evil.
I know… we’re a bit focused on education lately. Our teaching licensure bureaucracies are being leveraged as an instrument of the Left to indoctrinate and propagate that indoctrination. They have very little to do with the quality of teaching.
Meanwhile, researchers have found no difference in performance between certified and noncertified teachers. Supervisors also don’t seem to think licenses mean much: The Aspen Institute has found that just 7 percent of superintendents and 13 percent of principals think certification guarantees that a teacher “has what it takes” to be effective in the classroom.
Indeed, preparation programs frequently seem more focused on insisting that would-be teachers embrace an ideological deluge of “anti-racist” and “social justice” dogma. The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education champions the “integral role educator preparation programs play in advancing scholarly work on Critical Race Theory” and urges them to “resist recent federal attacks.” Accreditation standards for teacher preparation call for candidates to inventory “their personal biases” so as to promote “equity, diversity, and inclusion.” At the nation’s largest teacher-preparation programs, two in five faculty say that their area of study includes equity, race, or diversity — and about a third of these scholars employ a critical-race-theory perspective.
While alternative licensure programs may seem a promising workaround, the vast majority of them are owned and operated by schools of education. The schedule and structure of the programs may look different, but the culture, curriculum, and cost of the training don’t meaningfully change. Even programs such as Teach for America, which is inevitably depicted as an “alternative” route into the profession, typically partner with schools of education to license their teachers.
Proponents of teacher licensure frequently offer analogies to medicine or engineering, arguing that professionals in each field need certain essential knowledge and skills. They have it partly right. Those fields do require licenses. But what they ignore is that licensure in those professions signals only a baseline grasp of the requisite knowledge and skills — not that someone will be a “good” physician or civil engineer. Likewise, teacher licensure is a poor proxy for ensuring that someone will be a good teacher. Perversely, though, even as the ed-school professoriate preaches that good teaching is largely a matter of relationships and emotional intelligence, they defend bureaucratic, rigid licensure systems that just aren’t capable of accounting for these traits.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News this week.
The West Bend School Board is about to jack up taxes again to fuel their ever-increasing spending. This is despite rapidly declining enrollment. The good news, for them, is that the electors of West Bend just doubled their pay. It is very easy and rewarding to spend other people’s money.
At the annual meting of the West Bend School District’s electors, the school board put forth a resolution for consideration to increase the property tax levy by 7.25% to $47.8 million. The electors, who are just citizens of the district who decided to show up to the meeting, voted to approve the increase. It is not binding, but since it was the school board who drafted the resolution, they will likely approve the tax increase later this month.
This has become routine for the West Bend School Board. Irrespective of the state of the economy, the amount of federal stimulus money they received, or the number of kids they are educating, the West Bend School Board increases taxes. They are the proverbial scorpion crossing the river. It is just what they do.
The 7.25% tax increase this year is on top of the 6.21% tax increase last year and the 7.15% tax increase the year before. Thanks to the power of compounding, that is a 22% tax increase in just three years.
They have to increase taxes to support the increase in spending. This year’s budget increases overall spending by 7.12%. The district will break the $100 million budget threshold with a whopping $103.4 million. The West Bend School Board is continuing to increase spending despite the fact that enrollment in the district is collapsing.
According to enrollment figures provided by the school district, there are 5,824 full time equivalent (FTE) students in the district this year. That is a decline of 560 students, or 8.8% in just three years and over a thousand in five years. In the same three years where the West Bend School Board increased taxes 22% (assuming they pass this year’s proposed tax increase), student enrollment has declined by 8.8%.
The decline in enrollment has long been forecasted. There is a general decline in the school age population due to demographic trends. The decline has accelerated in some government school districts during the pandemic. Parents who were frustrated with unnecessary school closures and the damaging impact of onerous pandemic response theater moved their kids to private or home schools. But even without the pandemic, the West Bend School Board has known that the district’s enrollment was in for a decade-long decline in enrollment.
What has the West Bend School Board done to prepare for the decline in enrollment? Have they lowered expenses in line with lower enrollment? Not at all. Did they scale back staffing? No. Staffing is down about 4% since 2017 despite enrollment being down 26% over the same period. The school board has also voted to give the entire bloated staff substantial pay increases.
Have they closed any school buildings that are well below capacity? No. The district has the same number of schools as they have for years. Have they closed the district office and moved into one of the schools to save money? Nope. Have they outsourced non-educational functions to save cost? No. The school board has just kept spending because nobody is standing up and telling them to do anything different.
In fact, the electors rewarded the school board members’ spendthrift ways by doubling their pay. A large contingent of district employees and other local liberals showed up in force at the annual meeting to ensure that the tax increase would pass and to double the pay of the school board members. The school board did not propose a pay increase for themselves, but the electors in the room made sure that they got some more tax money in their pockets too.
People get the government they deserve. Unless the citizens of the district show up at the annual meeting, at school board meetings, and, most importantly, at their polling sites to elect actual conservatives to the board, this will continue to happen every year. There are no surprises here. These are the consequences of lethargy, bad candidates, and stupid decisions by the district’s citizens.
Just remember these tidbits when they jack up your kid’s tuition and whine about being poor.
After a year of spending cuts driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, fund balances at University of Wisconsin System campuses have grown significantly. Tuition reserves, in particular, have increased by more than 46 percent following years of sustained decreases that put some campuses in financial jeopardy.
Tuition fund balances are revenues left over after expenses are paid in a prior campus budget year and used to safeguard against unexpected costs or revenue losses.
According to a new UW System report on a variety of balances, unrestricted tuition fund balances in fiscal year 2021 increased to $333.2 million, which works out to an increase of more than 46 percent compared to the $227.3 million held at the end of the 2020 fiscal year. That’s the highest tuition balances have been since 2015. The increase follows years of consistent tuition fund balance declines driven by anger from Republican lawmakers over the size of balances held by system campuses nearly a decade ago.
[…]
In addition, the UW System got around $575 million in federal stimulus funds during the pandemic. Half of that is slated for student emergency aid. The UW System reports spending about $265 million in federal stimulus funds.
My column for the Washington County Daily News is online and in print. Here’s a taste:
The 7.25% tax increase this year is on top of the 6.21% tax increase last year and the 7.15% tax increase the year before. Thanks to the power of compounding, that is a 22% tax increase in just three years.
They have to increase taxes to support the increase in spending. This year’s budget increases overall spending by 7.12%. The district will break the $100 million budget threshold with a whopping $103.4 million. The West Bend School Board is continuing to increase spending despite the fact that enrollment in the district is collapsing.
According to enrollment figures provided by the school district, there are 5,824 full time equivalent (FTE) students in the district this year. That is a decline of 560 students, or 8.8% in just three years and over a thousand in five years. In the same three years where the West Bend School Board increased taxes 22% (assuming they pass this year’s proposed tax increase), student enrollment has declined by 8.8%.
[…]
Have they lowered expenses in line with lower enrollment? Not at all. Did they scale back staffing? No. Staffing is down about 4% since 2017 despite enrollment being down 26% over the same period. The school board has also voted to give the entire bloated staff substantial pay increases.
Have they closed any school buildings that are well below capacity? No. The district has the same number of schools as they have for years. Have they closed the district office and moved into one of the schools to save money? Nope. Have they outsourced non-educational functions to save cost? No. The school board has just kept spending because nobody is standing up and telling them to do anything different.
Lefties really hate it when people oppose what they are doing. They like to label any opposition as “politics” and slander the opponents as just engaging in “politics.” Well “politics” is the process by which we publicly debate what we want our government institutions to do. There is a sizable group of stakeholders who do not want to abuse our kids by forcing them to wear masks. They have to engage in politics to make their voices heard by our government schools. When Underly says that she wants to “take the politics” out of the mask debate, what she is really saying is that she wants to silence any opposition. She want you to shut up and do what you’re told.
Underly also had a message for local districts caught in the middle between parents pushing for masks and full COVID-19 mitigation efforts and parents demanding their children not wear masks at schools.
“My message to schools is hang in there. The issue itself has just become way too political. We need to remove politics from it. When we take politics out of it, we take the emotion out of it as well,” she said. “We have to take emotion out of some of these mitigation measures and follow the science and do what we need to do to protects kids and staff.”
This letter to the editor by Carol Heger takes us back a bit to illustrate the yawning gap between the rhetoric of the current board members and their actions. The spending doesn’t have anything to do with education. It has to do with supporting a political constituency with your money.
On Monday night, Sept. 27th, the West Bend School District (WBSD) held its annual meeting. Once again, the so-called, self-identified “conservative” school board members are proposing to raise the tax levy. This will be the third year in a row, if this resolution is approved, that the school board has increased the tax levy. In the 2019-20 school year, it was raised 7.15%, in 2020-21 it was raised 6.21%, and now the board is proposing a 7.25% increase.
In addition, the annual meeting revealed that the district’s gross total expenditures proposed for the 2021-22 school year are to increase 7.12% from $98,504,627 to $103,376,400. This increase in spending is happening when enrollment has declined about 200 students from 6,034 last year to an estimated 5,824 this school year. (In the last 10 years, the district has lost about 1,000 students.) This increase in spending and the property tax increase are happening when the schools all over Wisconsin are flush with federal stimulus funding.
While I support the need to teach civics, I’m not sure I trust 60%+ of the government school teachers to teach it fairly.
Under the bill, the required civics curriculum would have to include teaching the history and context of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and “a sense of civic pride and desire to participate regularly with government at all levels.”
The bill passed the Assembly on a 61-37 vote, with all Republicans and Democratic Rep. Sylvia Ortiz-Velez, of Milwaukee, voting yes. All other Democrats voted against it. The measure now heads to the Senate, which must also pass it before it would go to Gov. Tony Evers.
The people who show up make the decisions. The West Bend School District has an annual meeting in which the district’s electors can show up and vote on various items. Some of those things are binding. Some of them (like the levy) are advisory. Last night, West Bends’s liberals turned out to jack up taxes and double the pay for board members. This is despite declining enrollment and federal stimulus funding flooding the district.
The tax levy is proposed at $47,816,964, up 7.3% from $44,583,969.
[…]
A new change this year, brought forward by electors, was to double the compensation given to school board members, or $5,000 annually per member and $5,200 per officer. During the 2014-2015 budget year, compensation was approved at $2,500 per member per year and $2,600 per officer per year.
Mark Allen, District 2 alderman and school district resident, asked electors to disapprove of the resolution as proposed in favor of increasing compensation.
The presentation included this slide:
That’s a 14.7% decline in enrollment in just 5 years. That’s over a thousand fewer students to educate. They still haven’t closed any buildings. They are still overstaffed. But the electors in West Bend just gave them a massive tax increase and doubled the pay of the board making the decisions.
Conservatives in West Bend… if you want to know why this district is going to hell, look in the mirror. The liberals showed up. You didn’t.
I honestly don’t know if this is a problem or not. We don’t want teachers and administrators enforcing discipline if a student is truly committing a crime like assault or theft. It would be appropriate to call the police. So are Wisconsin’s school employees quicker on that trigger? Is there a higher degree of criminal behavior in Wisconsin’s schools? Is anyone actually doing anything wrong or is this just reflecting the reality?
Public schools in Wisconsin referred students to police twice as often as schools nationwide in 2017-18 — nine students were referred to police for every 1,000 students enrolled compared to the national rate of 4.5, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of U.S. Department of Education data found.
Just three states — New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Virginia — reported higher rates of referral than Wisconsin.
The analysis of data from all 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico found that school policing disproportionately affects students with disabilities, Black children and, in some states, Native American and Latino children. Nationwide, Black students and students with disabilities were referred to law enforcement at nearly twice their share of the overall student population.
In Wisconsin, students with disabilities and students of color also bore the brunt of school policing. In 2017-18, Wisconsin was more likely than any other state to refer Native students to law enforcement, reporting a rate over three times higher than the rate of referral for their white peers.
Interesting data. It helps inform us that when we are talking about the student debt “crisis,” we’re mostly talking about people who took on a lot of debt to go into lucrative professions. To have taxpayers pay that debt is really to have the working class pay off the debt of the professional class.
Overall, graduates with associate’s degrees borrowed an average of $14,000, as compared to bachelor’s degree grads who borrowed $23,000.
Then there are master’s degrees, of which the costs have been a large focus of the conversation around the price of higher education in recent months. Master’s degree holders borrowed a median of $40,000, according to the data, while professional degree recipients took out a median of $144,000 while doctoral degree graduates borrowed a median of $73,000, according to the data.
“The one pattern that really did jump out at me … is that the student debt for a master’s degree and for professional degrees is just off the charts,” Gillen said. “There’s really, really high debt for graduate programs. That doesn’t always hold for doctoral programs, which I felt was kind of interesting.”
I heard rumblings about the West Bend School Board’s meeting last night, but the video of parents sharing their views is incredibly compelling. Check out the Washington County Insider for more.
Quite a few parents asked the board to call an emergency meeting to remove the SEL and CRT curriculum from the West Bend School District.
“Stop teaching SEL in Badger and the high school and take emergency action to remove it now. You are causing harm to our children,” said parent Corine Freund. “It is not safe in our school. My son got beat up last week in your school district and I am tired of it.”
Nicole Casper has two children and already removed one from the district opting for homeschooling. “Why do you think it’s ok to continue teaching something parents don’t want,” she said. “Why is there such a pushback against parents who are concerned to have this stopped?”
Jamie Dutcher read from SEL curriculum that promoted a website for 13-and-14-year-old children. The website loveisrespect.org reminded students to “clear your history after visiting this website.”
“Sex can be a fun and gratifying activity for you and your partners to enjoy together. Five tips for your first time. … You can live chat your questions to us.”
Dutcher said she asked superintendent Jen Wimmer about the site and Wimmer told her the website was stricken from the curriculum.
