patrick.net

in praise of lawn darts
the basis for a civilization of free people resides in the skills that children learn from the benign neglect of unsupervised play in an un-nerfed world

Banning critical race theory in schools isn’t enough
Just as conservatives changed the courts, so too do they need to overhaul the education system

Stop Teachers Unions from Pushing the Covid Vaccine Mandate.

Did you know the Teachers Union donates millions of dollars to political campaigns and is a prime driver in the vaccine mandates for school aged children? This campaign is aimed to urge the heads of Teacher’s Unions in CA and across the country to say NO to vaccine mandates for K-12 children.

There’s no doubt that you or someone you love has been affected by the Covid-19 vaccine mandates. The pandemic has many living in a state of fear. Lockdowns, masks, and vaccines are a pervasive part of everyday life. But, what about our children? What about how this all affects them?

According to the CDC children are at a statistically 0% risk of serious illness or death from Covid. The CDC also acknowledges, the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus. Vaccine efficacy against Omicron is down to 27%, far below the 50% threshold required for FDA approval. Therefore, there is no need to vaccinate children against Covid.

On the other hand, there have been 41 reported deaths after COVID-19 vaccine among children aged 0 to 17. There have also been 602 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among and 51 reported cases of blood clotting disorders among children. It is evident that these vaccines carry serious risks for children.

Vaccine mandates override the right to provide informed consent for this medical intervention by not allowing patients or parents to make their own decisions. Considering the low Covid-related risks for healthy children, the risks associated with the vaccine, declining vaccine efficacy against new variants, the protection from any liability for vaccine manufacturers, it should absolutely be the right of every parent to decide whether to vaccinate their child.

Many school districts are requiring the Covid-19 vaccines and soon will likely mandate boosters for in person learning. Children in CA have already been forced out of schools due to mandates.

This is a crucial time in our Nation’s history. People across the globe are raising their voices and fighting for individual rights and freedoms and are mounting resistance to vaccine mandates and other coercive and ineffective pandemic measures. With less than a minute of your time you can take a single step and make a powerful impact! Join us in the fight against the k-12 student Covid Vaccine Mandate.

https://alignact.com/take/action/form?campaign=304

I don't know if it was overprotective mothers or greedy lawyers.

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY: A SOUR WINE GARDEN
by Romo1979
Posted onJanuary 30, 2022

Man, what is it about Jewish lesbians? It’s a triple whammy: The wokery of Jews, the wokery of women, and the wokery of homosexuals. This week’s Sapphic insanity belongs to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Often at this point I would translate stuff from Latin about harpies and furies and Stygian beasts, but sometimes a picture is indeed a thousand words:




There she is: All about Covidianism, all about BLM, all about the cult of St. George.

Despite being Jewish, Weingarten is the complete opposite of Janusz Korczak, the magnificent teacher who could have saved himself, yet jumped into the gas chambers after his students.

Weingarten is quite another character: At any given opportunity where minor risks to teachers are weighed against the benefit to students, she chooses the former. Her choice is ever to close down schools, shut down education, and cater to the baseless fears of her hysterical union members. For instance, here.

But that’s nothing new. What is new is that Weingarten now promotes, as the official policy of the AFT, that all its members and their students receive online information through the lens of something called “NewsGuard”. Apparantly it is a browser plug-in that uses a traffic light feature to indicate what information is kosher and what is not. Or in the words of the AFT:

“For years, educators have fought battles against suspect sourcing, with their students often misled by dubious outlets and spam sites posing as “news.” NewsGuard offers a practical solution, alerting students and educators to those sites while also providing a valuable lesson in media literacy.”

Now, we know how to read through these leftist platitudes, don’t we folks? “Spam” here clearly means conservative and right-leaning information, and “media literacy” means Wokery. And indeed, a study by the Media Research Center demonstrates NewGuard to be heavily biased against right-leaning websites.

So not only is Weingarten not willing to jump after the children to the bitter end, she insists on indoctrinating them first.

And thus she wins this week’s Jews Bevaving Badly Award, and with it a generous kick from Balaam’s donkey.




How very educational.

Parents are sick and tired of schools claiming they don’t teach Critical Race Theory (CRT), and yet these schools are using its teachings as the malignant undertone in every lesson. The rallying cry is the demand for schools to be transparent in their curriculum. After all, if you’ve got nothing to hide, then why would you fight the call for honest and open knowledge of curriculum and lesson plans?

Naturally, the left-wing activists in the media, school boards, and school staff have fired back with a push for less transparency. They don’t believe parents should have a say in their children’s education. If they are teaching your kids, then the kids belong to the state. Parents who object are no better than domestic terrorists, to quote the infamous NSBA letter.

The Educational Freedom Act not only allows parents to determine the school they believe is best for their kids (private, home school, parochial or public), but has language to specifically prevent mandates (like masks) that have nothing to do with good education and actually harm our kids, their future and us.

But before the Educational Freedom Act can become a reality though, we must collect more than a million signatures.

Can we count on you and your family commit to join this battle for educational freedom NOW? Will you help us put pressure on Newsom as he gears up for re-election? Click on the button below to join the fight. The next battle can only be won with your help.

Sign the Petition Today
Every child deserves a choice of the school they attend—the education they receive.
We mean everyone.
And that is only possible with
“The Educational Freedom Act”
More than two years in the drafting, the Educational Freedom Act treats everyone in California equally. Parents of every Californian child have the freedom to spend $14,000 provided by the State of California at a school of their choice—no matter how much money they make.

Sign the Petition Today
Every child deserves a choice of the school they attend—the education they receive.
We mean everyone.
And that is only possible with
“The Educational Freedom Act”
More than two years in the drafting, the Educational Freedom Act treats everyone in California equally. Parents of every Californian child have the freedom to spend $14,000 provided by the State of California at a school of their choice—no matter how much money they make.

Shannon Joy
@ShannonJoyRadio
Private Security team ASSAULTS a tax paying citizen for the Webster, NY school district at a Board of Ed meeting. Police stand by and WATCH. Absolutely insane.

The school board recalls that shook San Francisco
The left is dealt a blow in its most supportive city as fed-up tiger moms target the woke

February 16, 2022

In a widely watched special election this week, angry San Francisco voters recalled three school board members in a landslide. The other four, more recently selected, would have been expelled had law permitted it.

San Francisco’s municipal government is an embarrassment, and Exhibit A is its antic board of education. Some three quarters of city voters wanted them gone, and good riddance.

The recall’s success also pitted what remains of the city’s pragmatic Democratic “establishment” against woke radicals, as elected officials including the mayor disavowed unpopular progressive policies and backed the removal. District attorney Chesa Boudin, facing his own recall election on June 7, might be the next to go.

San Francisco is 8 percent registered Republican, but the losers blame right-wing funders and Fox News for the outcome. In fact, the recall evidences a seismic upsurge in parent resentment over public school closings, one that has been toppling boards across the country. Parents rubbed raw by remote learning and mask-and-vax mandates have encountered dogmatism and negligence, but none more egregious than San Francisco’s.

The city’s rapid descent from sparkling preserve of technocrats and internet millionaires to incipient hellhole continues. Michael Shellenberger has recently documented the decline in San Fransicko, an excellent book stuck with an alienating title (Shellenberger recently contributed an essay to the Spectator World about the city’s decline). The public schools are only one facet of civic collapse. Open drug dealing, crime and carjacking are backdrops to the 2022 recalls. City Hall’s failure to police homelessness and major crime are going bust with shaken blue-city voters high and low, and the recalls are powerful evidence of the dismay.

Drenched in natural beauty and clement climate, Northern California has long suffered from precious self-regard. We-Are-the-Future tech triumphalism in the giddy post-2007 era and the anything-goes psychedelic spirit were arguably its undoing. San Francisco is a magnet for adventurers, malcontents, and sketchy people, and some would say has been since its beginnings. But it also attracts some of the smartest, most inventive, stylish and enterprising people on the planet. Regrettably, many affluent San Franciscans see themselves as citizens of the world with a pleasant view of the Golden Gate Bridge, not as locals. Having the money to wall themselves and their children off from urban decay, they leave municipal politics to the proles and crazies.

The public schools are a mess. The district faces a $125 million budget shortfall and threat of state takeover. Money is drying up in part because parents are withdrawing their children and moving elsewhere, or enrolling their children in private schools, that is, running away from academic collapse. A third of San Francisco’s children are already privately schooled.

From March 2020 to August 2021, the city’s public schools went remote, and stayed there in spite of parent opposition and student distress. Operations remain at best uneven. The anti-recall United Educators of San Francisco can be thanked, along with the school board, for this yet untallied cost in learning in a district bloated with make-work staff and “para-educators.”

During the disruptions, the board acted to “desegregate” highly selective Lowell High School, a local icon and one of nation’s top schools, boasting powerful, professional alumni who venerate the place. It cited “pervasive systemic racism” and lack of diversity, which meant 60 percent Asian and 15 percent white. This attack on opportunity and excellence enraged Asian parents, many of them ruthlessly performance-oriented. (San Francisco’s public schools are officially 31 percent Asian, a clumsy racial designation that includes Chinese and Indians but not Filipinos.)

Then the board proposed to erase Paul Revere, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, James Russell Lowell, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dianne Feinstein’s names, among others, from local schools on account of vaguely framed racial and political sins.

The proposal drew universal scorn. Among other things, the contretemps revealed the board’s staggering ignorance. The move “was so poorly executed that it made a mockery of the broader push for historical reckoning in the United States,” the San Francisco Chronicle said in an editorial endorsing the board’s recall. “It alienated instead of educated, and invited national ridicule.”

Yet the board’s follies continued undaunted. Last week, it approved a resolution in “Support of Equitable Representation and Services for Two-Spirit Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex Asexual (2SLGBTQIA+) Parents and Families and Creation of a Queer Transgender Parent Advisory Council (QTPAC),” claiming to affirm student rights.

The initiative is set to cost the district $480,000, which will include salary and benefits for a full-time liaison, a project manager, and signage for more than 1,000 single-stall restrooms throughout the district. QTPAC will try to ensure that all things Krafft-Ebing are included in courses and school activities and will report on its oversight periodically. No one in the city establishment has yet repudiated this “equity” effort, one that degrades and replaces instruction at a time of fiscal crisis.

Up from the projects and billing herself as the city’s first black woman mayor, London Breed has spent her life as a public client and operative. One San Francisco observer calls Breed “a windsock,” just like her ally and fellow pragmatist, Governor Gavin Newsom. No one blows with the political wind better than the suave Newsom.

Breed does have a super-acute survival instinct, and she knows she’s in electoral trouble. Trying to make hay out of the recall, and by law able to fill the board vacancies, she cannot ignore what a city and its people need to function: sewers and water, hospitals and schools, firefighters and police, tax and sales revenues. While caught up in far-left suppositions about drugs, vagrancy and homelessness, Breed is now wondering to the press whether Boudin’s policies are protecting San Franciscans, saying his office should focus attention on crime victims, not accused criminals.

Breed and Newsom — Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi too — channel the collective will of Northern California’s semi-visible power brokers and donors, a small world that includes congenial federal judges and activist billionaires. Woke is no longer a fringe in high-end California politics or the Democratic Party.

Between pragmatic elected Democrats and the void stand ambitious progressives, also elected, who seek to transform US society from a commercial, constitutional republic into something else, what, no one can quite be sure. State senator Scott Weiner, a gay climate and gender activist, hopes to take Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat upon her retirement. Weiner himself supported the school board recall.

The more belligerent district attorney Chesa Boudin is one of several George Soros-supported progressive prosecutors nationwide who seek to reduce “tough on crime” prosecutions and jail sentences, hold police accountable for misconduct, and open jails. The mayor and Boudin have recently clashed over crime control and management of the drug addicts that haunt downtown. Facing pressure from his force, police chief Bill Scott has joined Breed, signaling support for Boudin’s recall.

The left is in a jam. The board of education’s frivolous initiatives and tiger parents’ unyielding academic demands cannot be reconciled. One frame of mind or the other will eventually dominate educational and social policies far and wide. Woke considers itself ascendant and indestructible — inevitable — and nowhere more so than in San Francisco. Whether or not this is destined to be is the political question of the decade.

50 maskless Paso Robles High School students. (Photo: Hunter Breese)
Paso Robles High School Teachers Grading Students Based On Face Mask Obedience
California students fighting for ‘mask choice’

By Allan Stevo, February 18, 2022 10:43 am

After a recent face mask protest at Paso Robles High School, some students started talking with each other about how they have been graded by teachers on face mask obedience at the school. Students have collected and verified the following teachers at Paso Robles High School have graded and evaluated students based on the level of obedience they showed in their mask use: Jennifer Fuller, Deborah McPherson, Amanda Logan, Geoffrey Land, Joshua Gwiazda, and Alexander Engle.

In response, this week 50 Paso Robles High students walked into the high school unmasked in violation of the recommendation and policies of the high school, county, and state. The students continued onward unmasked into the classroom. Soon, another 50-75 students joined them. (Photo above)