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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)
https://californiaglobe.com/articles/paso-robles-high-school-teachers-grading-students-based-on-face-mask-obedience/?source=patrick.net
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...
Zoomers kick Millie ass.
A recent study released from the National Centers for Education Statistics revealed that public schools have been experiencing a decrease in enrollment. Almost 4% of students were pulled out of public schools in the 2020-2021 school year. This was especially evident in the younger grades. According to the report, “Preschool enrollment dropped by 22 percent, and enrollment of kindergarteners fell by 9 percent.”
In Oakland, California, the enrollment drop has been so devastating that public schools in the area have been forced to close their doors or merge with other area schools to keep the city budget balanced. There are simply not enough students to fill the seats. Oakland is a bellwether for other urban school districts around the country. As Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, emphasized: “Normally, we would think a school district that lost 1% of its kids a year would be a seismic shift. This is so much greater than that in many urban areas.”
The City of Oakland acknowledges lower birth rates, lack of affordable housing, and the pandemic as reasons for the enrollment decline. But that’s only part of the story.
Yes, there has been a decline in birth rates. But what should you expect of a generation that’s been brainwashed to believe an animal’s life is more valuable than a child’s?
Yes, the pandemic has been a defining issue for parents who have seen firsthand what teachers have been filling their children’s heads with. It’s not merely Critical Race Theory, though that’s bad enough. It’s not just gender ideology, either. It is a pervasive, incessant attack on parents and family values.
Then you add in the academics (or lack thereof).
Children were suffered to learn virtually. For a very small number, this was a good route for their academic success. For the vast majority, though, it encouraged every sort of poor student behavior and, as a result, grades plummeted.
Another post-Covid preference that promises major social change is the desire of parents to have more control over their children’s schooling. For some, creating alternatives to closed local schools — joining with neighbors to collaboratively homeschool in so-called “learning pods” or “micro-schools,” for example — turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding challenge. A poll taken by EdChoice during the first year of Covid found that many parents became far more comfortable with educating their own children than they had ever thought possible.
And for those parents whose children continued to take public school classes online, seeing how far woke pedagogy had penetrated the curriculum — even into math and science courses — proved deeply disturbing. Along with parents who were angry simply because many teacher unions had dragged out the resumption of in-person learning, they have become vocal advocates for government funding of private and parochial schools, private tutoring, and other K-12 alternatives.
February 24, 2022
Michigan school superintendent admits to snooping on parents’ social media posts, contacting employers
The admission came during a First Amendment lawsuit against the district.
By Ben Squires
The superintendent admitted, in a court deposition, to monitoring social media and reporting parents.
The deposition was part of a lawsuit that was filed by a parent who was fired after the district reported her posts to her employer.
During the deposition, Superintendent Robert Shaner admitted that he called one parents’ employer and the Detroit Police because he was “scared” of a social media post the parent made calling for people to protest outside the homes of the school district’s officials.
The parents wanted schools to reopen.
Texas School District's Gender Equality Board bans Parents from attending meetings as soon as they start attending.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/03/04/fort-worth-independent-school-district-racial-equity-committee/?source=patrick.net
For almost 250 years, the education of children, first in England’s North American colonies and then in the United States of America up until the Civil War, was almost an entirely private affair. Parents had the freedom to choose the education, ideas, and values that they wanted for their children. The government was not involved in educating children. This is the great forgotten story of American history.
During this quarter millennium, children were typically educated in one of four ways. They were either homeschooled or they attended one of three different kinds of schools: 1) tuition-charging private schools; 2) charitable or “free” private schools established by philanthropists and religious societies; or 3) semi-public “district” schools (later known in the nineteenth century as “common schools”).
The so-called “district” schools of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are held up today by proponents of government schooling to suggest that government-run education has existed in America since the seventeenth century. But this is not true.
Existing mostly in New England, these “district” schools were what we might call “neighborhood” schools that were built and monitored by the parents of the children who attended them, and they were financed by a combination of tuition charges, local taxes, and mutual-aid societies. These neighborhood schools were controlled entirely by parents, who chose and supplied the textbooks and who hired and fired teachers. Though partially funded by local taxes, these neighborhood schools were not government schools in any meaningful way. The government did not determine who was hired, nor did it determine what was taught. ...
The primary objectives of America’s new Prussianized education system were fivefold: first, to replace parents with the State as the primary influence on the education of children; second, to elevate and promote the interests of the State; third, to substitute America’s highly individualistic and laissez-faire social-political system with one that was collectivistic and statist in nature; fourth, to create a new kind of citizen, whose primary virtues would be self-sacrifice, compliance, obeisance, and conformity; and, fifth, to Americanize and Protestantize the teeming hordes of Irish-Catholics who were coming to the United States (and then the waves of immigrants coming to the U.S. after the Civil War from southern and eastern Europe).
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