School is back across the country, so let's survey the landscape of both higher and lower education. At the University of Michigan, students who test positive for COVID are being forced into off-campus quarantine -- like something out of 2021. They may not attend classes, and they may not remain in their dorm rooms, "even if they are in a single room."
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford writes, "students testing covid positive must leave their dorms for 5 days & live in the community. A hotel room or a relative's house is ok. This cruel policy is designed to spread covid from the university into the wild. It won't stop covid from spreading." A cruel, unworkable, and anti-science COVID policy? Of course it's being implemented at a major university. Jennifer Sey, who lost her major corporate job because she declined to be silenced about institutional responses to COVID, has more questions. She asks, "a college student is supposed to go live in a hotel room for 5 days? What college student can afford that? Are they insane? Once again, policy designed for the well-off. Impossible for anyone else. And why is it better to go “into the wild” than stay with other low risk college kids? It’s enough! Let these kids alone." She adds, "weren’t these kids all required to be vaxxed and bivalent boosted to prevent spread? So what’s up with kicking them off campus when they have asymptomatic Covid that they were quad boosted to prevent? This is so pointless and stupid. Who designs these rules?" Ideological progressive, ass-covering higher ed bureaucrats, that's who. The cruelty and the incoherence is the point. They have the power, and they won't let anyone forget it.
Taxpayer-funded Oregon Public Broadcasting is also casting the return of students to school as a dangerous development, with a headline warning of a "festival of viruses" to come. Bhattacharya slams this framing, too: "There is a real sickness in casting children as, first and foremost, vectors of disease," he writes. "And that sickness is in the adults who instrumentalize kids in such a way. Institutionalized hypochondria is no way to organize a society." Somewhat relatedly, the Associated Press describes a serious problem facing institutions of higher learning, symptomatic of disastrous COVID policies that led to learning loss and other harmful disruptions to the educational process. "As academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to college, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. Colleges are searching for solutions:"
[A] northern Virginia school started Math Boot Camp because of alarming numbers of students arriving with gaps in their math skills...Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes. Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow. At George Mason, fewer students are getting into calculus — the first college-level course for some majors — and more are failing. Students who fall behind often disengage, disappearing from class.
Conservative writer Carol Platt Liebau rightly takes the AP to task for framing these setbacks as caused by the pandemic: "(1) It wasn’t the pandemic that created learning loss; it was the government RESPONSE to the pandemic, dictated by the teachers’ unions. (2) Those same unions that have failed children demand a monopoly on 'educating' those who can’t afford alternatives." Both points are correct. On the subject of teachers unions, this is just a perfect story out of Chicago, home to one of the most virulent and toxic unions in the country:
Stacy Davis-Gates is undoubtedly Illinois’ most prominent and rabid opponent of school choice — and pretty much everybody and everything associated with it, all of which she labels racist or worse. As president of the Chicago Teachers Union, she is at the forefront of its campaign to kill Illinois’ meager Invest in Kids Act, which currently gives about 9,000 disadvantaged kids scholarships to attend private schools. “It must be ‘game over'” for the program, the CTU says...But, as initially reported** by SubX News, she sends one of her kids to to Chicago’s De La Salle Institute, a private, Catholic high school...De La Salle, where Davis-Gates sends one of her three kids, has long been a diamond in the rough of Southside high schools. But with tuition at $14,750 per year, it’s open only to those with some means, like Davis-Gates, and the few who are fortunate enough to get financial help.
This woman has called school choice "racist," and has offered lunatic-style rantings such as, "we are concerned about the encroachment of fascists in Chicago. We are concerned about the marginalization of public education through the eyes of those who’ve never intended for Black people to be educated. So we’re going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that type of fascism and racism does not exist on our Board of Education." Her union cheered on Illinois Democrats' political strangulation of a small but successful scholarship program for low-income families. Her ilk insist that other people's kids be stuck in failing schools, while sending their own children wherever they see fit. That's not just a grotesque demonstration of hypocritical privilege; it's also deeply immoral to hurt poor students and their families this way. One wonders how this statistic looks these days, 20 years after this survey was taken (things have deteriorated since):
A 2004 Fordham Institute study found that 39 percent of Chicago public school teachers send their own children to private schools. That's compared to a national average of 12 percent of all children who are educated privately. Think about that. Four out of 10 Chicago teachers are willing to pay money to keep their kids from attending the schools where they teach. That speaks volumes.
Some parents in Jefferson County say teachers are breaking state and federal laws and their union is helping them get away with it. At issue are student surveys about gender identity. While the school district says it's unclear whether surveys about students' preferred pronouns are illegal, there are several lawsuits regarding the issue. So, administrators told teachers - just don't go there. The teachers union told them something else. An email from Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA) to teachers says, "if you do a questionnaire, please make it a paper and pencil activity - any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law." The union also encouraged teachers to "make your notations about students and not hold on to the documents."
Keeping gender transitions at government schools secret from minors' parents is fast becoming a trendy, mainstream stance within leftist Democratic politics -- despite its wild unpopularity with regular people. Opposing public schools engaging in secret gender transitions for children without their parents' knowledge is the next front in this left-wing culture war. And Democrats are stuck on this:
Virginia Dems picking up where Terry McAuliffe left off in ‘21, propping up big labor, school-closure advocate Randi Weingarten over Virginia parents. https://t.co/WxnL75heGZ
— Rob Damschen (@RobDamschen) September 5, 2023