I missed this earlier. The black high school principal in Texas who was targeted for removal by white conservatives on bogus charges that he indoctrinated children with critical race theory was forced to resign. NBC News:
COLLEYVILLE, Texas — The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students…
“This is beyond me,” [James Whitfield] said in an interview Monday with NBC News. “I’m hopeful that we can use this to move forward and to progress and get some true meaningful change and for people to be OK with teaching truth, people to be OK with embracing inclusivity and diversity, celebrating every student that walks through the doors of our schools.”
Whitfield will remain on paid administrative leave until August 2023.
All of the reports indicate there’s zero evidence the school was teaching CRT because of course they aren’t, but here’s an account from an earlier NBC report that outlines the principal’s alleged offenses:
After Whitfield was named principal, some parents issued unspecified complaints about photos of him and his white wife celebrating their anniversary that were kept in album on his Facebook page. Other parents grew outraged after he took part in a district-approved presentation on diversity. Some parents were particularly angry after he wrote an email about George Floyd’s murder in which he said systemic racism was “alive and well.”
The horror. The forced resignation is bullshit, but at least Cow Town taxpayers will be on the hook for paying Whitfield through most of 2023. When communities encourage bad behavior, whether by hiring and retaining rogue cops, caving to extremists who disrupt schools, etc., there should be a price.
Lots of the high school students, including some white kids, stood by their principal during his fight to retain his job. Those kids learned a bitter lesson this year. Maybe they can change Texas if they choose to stick around. Open thread.
Baud
Amen. Glad he’s getting paid at least.
burnspbesq
Suburban Dallas is a very strange place.
debbie
I’m glad he’s still getting paid, but I hope he turns around and sues the county’s ass off.
japa21
The stupid, it hurts.
NotMax
Texas. It’s a whole ‘nother
countrydimension.RosiesDad
I heard an interview with Whitfield a few weeks ago and my impression was that he is an outstanding educator and administrator and the school district was using CRT as an excuse to run him out.
Great that he’s getting two academic years worth of severance and hopefullly he will land somewhere that a man of his quality will be appreciated.
Baud
Au contraire, the evidence now shows that the school was proving CRT correct.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Excellent point.
NotMax
Hmph. Morning thread disappeared faster than a Milk Bone at the Puppy Bowl.
SiubhanDuinne
The pre-stomping worked! Anne Laurie has taken down her Saturday Morning Open Thread. //
Snark, just kidding, etc. (FTR, I almost never object to, and often welcome, several threads running more or less simultaneously.)
Mathguy
This entire episode describes Texas to a tee: a lot a good people but a shit-ton of stupid racists.
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne: I have absolutely no problem with being stomped. But the thread will reappear.
Betty Cracker
@Mathguy: Same in FL.
debbie
The kids understand the truth and are much smarter than their parents. If we can just hold on for a while, maybe the stupid will die off.
rikyrah
There is no CRT because THEY ARE NOT A LAW SCHOOL.
HIS SIN?
HAVING A WHITE WIFE??
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Yup. We can walk and chew nails at the same time.
:)
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
Glad to know that. I hadn’t heard enough Jen to get the juices properly flowing.
Betty
@debbie: They give us old folks hope. They are great about diversity and climate change. Now we need some of our “even older than Boomers” to kindly step out of the way to make some space.
Another Scott
@rikyrah: +1
People in authority (like those trying to do a good job with schools) have to accept that noisy cranks will eventually come for them. I don’t know the solution, but giving in to the mouth breathers doesn’t lessen the problems.
I hope that he gets a large settlement.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Oh, a-crunching we shall go,
A-crunching we shall go.
We’ll chew a little nail
And toss it in a pail,
And then we’ll let it go.
:-)
mrmoshpotato
@SiubhanDuinne:
Who needs coffee in the morning when we have Jen Psaki smacking RWNJs upside the head?
mrmoshpotato
First snowfall in Chicago yesterday. Happy winter everyone!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, this.
I don’t know which Those White People are more in closet about; gay sex or having sex with blacks.
SiubhanDuinne
@mrmoshpotato:
Nobody. Jen Psaki is a one-woman caffeine machine.
debbie
@Another Scott:
Noisy cranks used to just be noisy cranks, bitching and complaining. These people, fueled by lies and armed with more weaponry than they know what to do with, are an entirely different beast.
OzarkHillbilly
Plenty of time to write his tell all book on their dime.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Hopefully Mr. Whitfield will go where he is valued.
Woodrow/asim has the best take on our current situation: There are two classes of people in this country – those who think that me and my people are full citizens of this country, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereof; and those who not only do not, but will sacrifice ANYTHING INCLUDING THEIR OWN CHILDREN and also burn the country to the ground to prevent it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
One wonders how easily it will be to get a replacement principle after that. From what I gather being a Principal is a rough enough job as it is, add in community full of Celtuses and Karens who decided school admin is their current victim after Target banned them and that’s sounds like it’s not worth it.
Immanentize
@rikyrah:
But but … Clarence Thomas!!!!
mrmoshpotato
@SiubhanDuinne: Psaki bomb for breakfast! ?
Yarrow
@debbie:
Maybe. Maybe not.
Immanentize
I think it is Magi Jay who has been pleading with people to stop saying “CRY wasn’t taught in that school.” We need to see that CRT does not mean Critical Race Theory, it means Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to the red faced screamers. It means black and brown people get a say.
Also, saying “it’s not taught there” is sort of an admission that there would be a problem if it were.
Suggestions include asking for outcomes: “Do you really want kids to call each other the N-word/C-word in school?” “Do you want little Kevin/Karen to not know the books that are tested in AP/SAT/ACT tests?” Etc. Up and down the class line.
Betty Cracker
@Immanentize: I understand her point, but I’m ambivalent about it. I agree about expressing support for school DEI activities, but wingnuts are lying about the CRT thing, and maybe it’s useful to point that out too.
NotMax
@Immanentize
“SATs are obvious socialist Communist tools of perfidy. None of the multiple choice questions offer ‘Jesus’ as the answer.”
//
Kay
“Parents Defending Education” are the Koch-backed group who managed and promoted the Virginia panic and “Moms for Liberty” are primarily based in Texas.
Betty Cracker
The mister went to look at new trucks, dog help us.
Sure Lurkalot
@debbie: I have a niece who lives in an affluent Dallas suburb with 2 teen kids in high school. From their stories, there are very many kids who are very much not all right and spitting images of their fundy parents.
The story told here seems to reinforce what I’m told…a percentage of kids who are “all right” in a sea of white privilege and grievance.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: They’re running with the enforcement by bounty concept.
UncleEbeneezer
Magdi Semrau has been killing it on CRT Panic and Dem massaging, imo, recently. Here’s an exchange I joined into.
Seamrau:
“Democrats need to stop saying, “CRT isn’t taught in schools.” When they do this, they are not clarifying the issue &, worse, they are affirming the insinuation that CRT is a nefarious force, thus strengthening the dog-whistle, rather than weakening it.
Another point: Although the assertion that CRT is not taught in K-12 is accurate, CRT & overlapping concepts *are* taught to many educators & do influence their curricula, as well as school board decisions. In my view, this is good thing, given racism is codified in K-12 ed.”
To which I responded:
“Thank you for saying this. The defensive response of “CRT isn’t even taught in schools” while true, has always felt a bit off, especially since the Conservative freakout is absolutely a fear of students understanding Systemic Racism. The two are not entirely unrelated.
And your point about how it perpetuates a negative framing of CRT (itself a very good thing) is a very good one. It also allows them to continue demonizing critical thinking in general, by association. It’s the critical thinking part (applied to race) that scares them.”
As much as these parents try to make it all about their kids’ feelings of shame/guilt (won’t someone think of the (white) children?!!) the real freakout, imo, is over the prospect that their kids will see, acknowledge and understand Systemic Racism and feel the need to fight against it. Remember that ALL OF THIS started with the emergence of Black Lives Matter and people starting to point out the Systemic nature of Racism in US Policing (and everything else). This is what scares the shit out of the wealthy GOP operatives that are funding the CRT Panic. They see cities trying progressive reforms, Southern Traitor Statues being torn down and people talking about health disparities in Communities of Color (Covid, infant mortality etc.) and they see a world that is starting to recognize and address Systemic Racism. They are using individual examples (this book, that teacher) but the goal is to protect the system at all costs. Culture (Lovecraft, Watchman, How to Be an AntiRacist, 1619 Project) is against them and they can’t stop more and more white people from waking up, but schools are the one area where they can use their influence in rural areas.
I agree with Semrau that we should go on the offensive by using intelligent and popular framings that show that we are the multi-racial coalition that wants ALL students to feel safe and get a great education by learning the truth about our history and acquiring the critical thinking skills they will need to apply to every subject including race, gender, etc. These skills are absolutely required for navigating school, college, and adulthood in 2021.
Anat Shenker-Osario of WeMakeTheFuture has some excellent, well-polled examples of messaging we can use to push back on the CRT Panic to affirm our commitment racial equality and school equity without falling into their trap. We should have a series of posts about her suggestions soon (assuming WaterGirl is still interested).
Starfish
@debbie: They are also able to continue this because they are getting funding from billionaires.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: Valid points to consider.
Starfish
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
and their parents and anyone doing any domestic labor for them.
It is monstrous.
Jerzy Russian
@Betty Cracker:
Maybe he is taking Raven’s motto of “fuck it, drive on” to heart?
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Just in case, orders for the 2022 Ford Maverick hybrid pick-up close for the year on the 15th.
Pl;aced an order in August. With any luck might be receiving it by March. $20k for the base model with no additional options, EPA numbers of 42 mpg city.
germy
Thread:
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Fucking New Hampshire…ugh (as someone who grew up in MA)
These are the same assholes who think teachers having guns is a good idea.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
You would not believe how broad “CRT” has become. The list of banned subjects, speech and entire ideas gets longer and longer at headquarters: Parents Defending Education. They issue directives.
Public school teachers will be permitted to run rote drills for standardized tests. That’s about it. Even there they could easily get into trouble. The test questions themselves could easily fall into the now-massive CRT- redacted area.
Kristine
@mrmoshpotato:
Snow squalls up here near the border. It was still above freezing so it all melted on contact, but still. Lo-vis driving off and on.
Omnes Omnibus
@Immanentize: But our local (Balloon Juice) CRT concerned citizen says one of the problems is that CRT is getting rig of the SAT. So, both sides or something.
Mathguy
@Betty Cracker: You needn’t worry. Every lot I drive by is practically empty. Went by one dealership with 7 vehicles in the lot.
Starfish
@Betty Cracker: Since when does “you are lying” get a person to stop lying? Going down the road of “Please explain what CRT means” may be more fruitful.
It is not that they are trying very hard to ignore systemic racism. They are also being confronted with the fact that they have been teaching false histories and that a lot of “the classics” were not very good. Those last two things really matter.
A lot of folks equate the education that they got with good education, and it just wasn’t.
Baud
@Kay: Time to starting reporting some wingnut teachers in NH.
Betty Cracker
@NotMax: That’s exactly the truck he’s looking at. He currently drives an F-250 diesel and needed the hauling capacity for years but no longer does.
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
Don’t kid yourself. They tucked it into a massive new private school voucher bill. There’s an ideological goal here and it has nothing to do with public schools. They’re simply using public schools as this year’s lever – a tool- to get the far Right legislative outcomes they want.
It is amusing to watch how quickly they’ve abandoned the elite liberals who supported this panic though. Used them to validate the panic and threw them away. It’s all hard Right, hardball politics now.
NotMax
@Betty Cracker
Orders for the regular gas version engine remain open, but the hard deadline for placing an order for a hybrid is the 15th, must be submitted by a dealer to Ford no later than the 17th.
NotMax
Coding goof. Fixed.
@Betty Cracker
Orders for the regular gas version engine remain open but the hard deadline for placing an order for a hybrid is the 15th, must be properly submitted by a dealer to Ford no later than the 17th.
stinger
Yeah, I remember that. So they manufactured some other excuse to get rid of him.
Kay
@Baud:
For me, the tip off that this wasn’t going to end up as a “free speech movement” was when every single “anti-woke” person was writing the same fucking essay. Have they noticed that yet? That their “free exchange of ideas” movement is endless variations on the same rant? There will be three issued on each subject of the day – one on the Right, one in the “center” and one on the Left- all the same.
debbie
@Kay:
Hope the teachers wrongly removed will file budget-breaking lawsuits. Cash is what they understand; truth and principles, not so much.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: Get ready for a 2nd Home mortgage.
Starfish
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
They will likely get a principal from a high performing school who wants “more of a challenge.”
Those principals who are serving in very white schools will sometimes get foisted on poor people of color, and they will not be able to solve poverty, so they will fail in that situation.
However, in “high performing schools,” they have gotten a lot of experience dealing with the politics of Karens. They might have better success at navigating these Karens. Also, these principals need to be men. These Karens will definitely eat any women who are thrown before them, but they may defer to some dude.
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: Oh yeah, no disagreement here. You are absolutely right about it being the latest front in their war on public schools (I just didn’t go there because that’s a whole other angle, and way more words). It’s a multi-faceted movement, but nothing I wrote is mutually exclusive from what you wrote. In fact there’s a natural synergy between them. And I think ASO’s messaging takes that into consideration as well. But I think one of the reasons they’ve always hated public schools (in addition to being open to those people) is that they have always feared having their children learn critical thinking skills that will make them question the shit their parents have taught them (Creationism, Patriarchy, Lost Cause, Racism is only interpersonal not Systemic, etc.). So this panic allows them to protect their favored hierarchies, keep their kids ignorant and politically in-line, while also sending $$$ to wealthy elites.
Also: I should note that I say this all as a white man who was forbidden from even applying to schools like Dartmouth if I wanted my Conservative Dad to foot the bill. Liberal Indoctrination is a very real fear for these parents. And while it may fit nicely along with filling the coffers of Private School Elites, that wasn’t the main reason for my Dad’s position. He just didn’t want me learning shit he disagreed with, plain and simple. And this is staggeringly common among parents.
OzarkHillbilly
It doesn’t, never has. But it puts everybody listening on notice that the individual is not to be trusted.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: Someone down the road just got a new Maverick. It looks like a normal truck, but there’s a hybrid version that they claim gets 40+ MPG!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
@rikyrah:
Yeppers.
@Baud:
This too.
sdhays
@UncleEbeneezer: My aunt and uncle lived in NH for over 40 years, but this year they’ve just up and left to retire in Panama. That shocked me because I know my uncle likes cool weather. But apparently they just couldn’t stand the people there anymore.
Baud
@Kay:
Some speech is more
equalfree than others.Kay
@Baud:
Here’s their incredibly genuis, individualistic and edgy take on Rittenhouse:
Bari Weiss@bariweiss
What does abolish the police look like? It looks like Kyle Rittenhouse,
Except they all had the same idea. It’s like a directive went out- “here’s the offocial anti-woke framing of Rittenhouse- blame Lefty activists”
None of them notice this or address it. It has somehow escaped their notice that their “diverse ideas” are all the same. It’s as if self identifying as “Left” or “Right” somehow makes the same essay different. Why is the Freddie deBoer essay different than another anti-woke essay? Because Freddie deBoer is a poseur socialist!
Okey-doke. So we’ll get 15 of the same essay but from writers who claim different ideologies.
UncleEbeneezer
@sdhays: We visited New England in the Fall of 2016 (just before the election) and when we went up to NH it was Trump signs EVERYWHERE…:(
Baud
@Kay:
Tell it to Hillary Clinton.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
We carried NH both times though (and most of Maine).
UncleEbeneezer
@Kay: To be fair, some Black Southern podcasters I love do share this perspective of Abolishing the police and what it would mean for their Black lives in a Red state surrounded by White racists. Their point: No we don’t want NO POLICE, we just want police to treat us like everyone else. This is not an uncommon sentiment among Black voters. And I’ve literally helped organize community conversations on the topic with local Black leaders and community members. Bari Weiss is a useless troll, and she’s trolling in favor of White Supremacy here. But her point isn’t (at least in part) total BS.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
One of them, but I don’t think we should ignore
@RosiesDad:
because these people hate a black man being better than them as much or more than they hate race mixing.
@debbie:
Dunno. They used to take those guns, go out, and beat the minority person that got their attention to death, hang them from a tree, or burn down an entire neighborhood. I admit, as national awareness of actions like that has grown it made it harder for them to get away with it, and they are enraged about that and want to take that right back.
@UncleEbeneezer:
Yep. They may be doing harm themselves, but the existence of the police is what actually stops whole mobs of Rittenhouses from pulling a mostly competent Jan 6th every day to purge minorities from officeholding, or from standing in front of schools and preventing blacks from entering. Conservatives want to do these things badly, and are only prevented because they are scared of law enforcement.
Kay
@Baud:
There’s something else about this too. It’s a denial that there can BE black intellectuals. That’s not permitted. Bell can’t put forth critical race theory as an idea. No, he must first determine if some broad cross section of white people would accept it politically. This doesn’t apply to white intellectuals. No one tells white intellectuals “but will that idea of yours carry swing voters in this Dallas suburb?”
Why would black intellectuals and academics not be permitted to formulate politically unpopular ideas? White intellectuals do it all the time. “Well, this AA historian is certainly complicating the political messaging!” She’s a historian. She’s not in the political messaging business.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: Yes but weren’t both pretty close, and aren’t their State Govs pretty conservative?
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
Maybe the teachers in places like this should flip the script and go on strike.
I’d chip in to a strike fund.
Chief Oshkosh
@rikyrah: Ab-so-fucking-lutely. There is no more triggering event for these shitbirds than a black man dating or marrying a white woman. As Baud notes, the fucking shitbirds are walking, (mouth)breathing object lessens in CRT. They are a racist own-goal.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Didn’t you see that CRT originated with Kant as a rejection of the Enlightenment? It was in the Post.
Starfish
@UncleEbeneezer: The freak-out over the police abolition movement is much bigger than the actual police abolition movement.
The only true police abolitionist that I know of is the person who runs the Colorado Freedom Fund. I had never seen the abolitionist perspective on policing before I saw her writings.
The abolition movement goes beyond just policing. It also has to do with jails and prisons and how these institutions continued to perpetuate slavery by providing free/cheap labor.
We have turned some things in policing and prison into jokes because we can’t deal with how horrible they are:
– suicide by cop
– prison rape
Both of these things are terrible things that should not happen.
No one wants to feel unsafe.
However, are the police doing a good job at keeping us safe? Do we have any responsibility at all for our sense of safety? How much of a city budget should be a police budget? How much should cities be paying to victims families for violence that police have committed against them? I am not saying that victims families should not be compensated, but some places are compensating families and also increasing police budgets without any attempt to reform whatever went wrong in policing. When there are attempts to reform policing, police quit doing their jobs until everyone feels more unsafe.
SteveinPHX
@NotMax:
I’ve ordered one and the wait is interminable. Every morning I pray my current ride doesn’t pick today to die.
Meant as reply to BC’s post from over there in FL. I need a new truck I might can afford!
Sloane Ranger
@Baud:
Precisely what I was about to suggest. Judging from what I’ve read there’s plenty of them about. Someone should organise a write in from POC and Democratic parents to overwhelm their inboxes.
kindness
This episode of firing the poor guy is sad. But the reminder that there were good people standing up to the racist assholes brings hope. All too often whole regions of the country are labelled hard core nut case even though there are good people in those areas. We ignore them because we don’t see them so much as the sociopaths shouting and carrying on like a band of primates. Of course a big part of the problem is those quiet good people don’t make good media coverage where as the assholes get eyeball clicks from both the right and the left. The way our modern media is set up is hurting us and I don’t think we can change it any time soon.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I saw it in passing but decided to spare myself the details.
I saw this same kind of thinking with Ta-Nehisi Coates. “is he hinting at reparations? What does that mean politically?”
He doesn’t care and he shouldn’t have to. He’s not anyone’s political operative or messaging person. That’s not what he does. It’s a category error but for some odd reason this “error” always runs in the direction of putting black thinkers and writers in a box where their ideas are subject to some kind of popularity contest, where they need a political mandate. No, they don’t.
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: Dartmouth? He thought Dartmouth was liberal?
Brachiator
About the only good thing about this story was the diversity of the students who tried to defend the principal.
Otherwise it was sadly typical of the worst of some sullen, hard hearted racist communities. I was not surprised at all that what angered many of these fools was the fact that the principal was married to a white woman.
This is chump change to these Deplorables. They would pay any price to be able to continue to stew in their small minded bigotry.
And it’s a damn shame that the worst of the students feel safe, secure and supported in their racist behavior.
Kay
The issue of standardized testing is complicated and no one should accept the antiwoke dabblers dumbing down how varied the debate is- the problem is they just started following “public education” 6 months ago so they have a millimeter-deep understanding of it.
For example. The most anti-woke governor in the country, DeSantis, is reducing the role of standardized tests.
And on standards? Well, liberals tried to raise standards with the Common Core. That’s what that was- an effort to raise standards to one that was uniformly higher (although a different “high” depending on the state). The Right went absolutely insane. They screamed “give us BACK our lower standards!”
The people promoting this panic want to dumb this down. They want to pretend there’s some coherent “anti-woke” side and then a “woke” side. It’s much, much more complicated than that.
There are people who support standardized tests ON EQUITY GROUNDS. A lot of them. I’m one of them. I think AA and/or lower income kids are going to fare better in an environment where there’s a measure that isn’t as subjective as “we’ll just decide whether to admit them or not”.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
I wish your dad could see you now.
randy khan
So his real mistake was marrying a white woman and putting something about it on social media. (Let’s be honest, that’s what started all of this.)
Shades of the people who said they didn’t care if you were gay as long as you didn’t “flaunt” it by, oh, telling people or putting a photo of your significant other on your desk.
Brachiator
@Immanentize:
You do realize that none of this bothers many racist parents, especially the affluent ones who can get their kids into college no matter how stunted their education might have been.
Kay
@Baud:
Will the anti-woke public intellectuals explain at some point how radical Marxists have taken over the whole higher education system in a country where “business” is always in the top three majors?
What is it they think most people study in college? They understand that the majority of them are there for things like “accounting” and “nursing” and “engineering” right? Are they really running around under the delusion that most people go to Oberlin? We collect these statistics in the United States. I believe federal websites are available to columnists at the NYTimes.
“Public schools”, being public and federally regulated generate a SHIT ton of actual data and they report it, because they have to. They don’t have to just idly wonder about this. They could go look.
Baud
@Kay:
For them “taking over” means about 3 people are radical Marxists.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Also, the other people are willing to have lunch with them.
RaflW
“Whitfield will remain on paid administrative leave until August 2023.” Seems like excellent use of taxpayers relatively scarce dollars.
I agree with Betty that he deserves at least his pay and benefits for that long after getting screwed over this bad. BTW, I’d like to plug donations to the Tarrant County Democratic Party. I’m not a monthly giver there, but I give a couple times a year to ’em.
I went to college about 15 miles from Colleyville, at TCU. Tarrant County is close to flipping Blue. And they can use some organizing help. From here in MN that looks like donations for me. TX Senate Dist 10 includes a chunk of Colleyville. Tarrant Dems write:
We can help send a message to Colleyville and the Texas GOP. Democrats are competing. Hard.
Kay
@Baud:
They’re not even presenting an accurate depiction of the system itself– who uses it, where they go, what they study. They had to start there. But they didn’t, because that’s too much work and they are opinion essayists- they’re dabblers.
I think it’s delicious that Andrew Sullivan is the leader. He’s moved on from not knowing shit about the US health care system to not knowing shit about the US education system. He’s such an ambitous dope! Why opine on small things with no background or real information? Think bigger!
Baud
@Kay:
https://images.app.goo.gl/T4VY7W5PLqJ3L32P6
Brachiator
@Baud:
These people never got the memo that even Marxists have moved on. There aren’t any Marxists around, not even Groucho or Harpo.
RaflW
@Baud: We don’t talk enough about how a Marxist education system fronted by such luminaries as Princeton and Harvard managed to produce Ted Cruz.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: Great point about the most popular majors.
Omnes Omnibus
@RaflW: Even the best programs have their failures.
RaflW
@Kay: None of this is grounded in reality. The attack is purely symbolic. Marxism isn’t a thing in American discourse, but it sounds bad. Yikes! say the rubes.
These R politicians are people who can attack gay marriage as ‘destroying America’ and when you point out their brother is gay, they say ‘oh, well, he’s well behaved’ and just feel no dissonance at all.
J R in WV
@UncleEbeneezer:
Actually, Dartmouth is now probably a pretty conservative school. Dinesh D’Felon graduated from there, after all…
RaflW
@Omnes Omnibus: Seems like I noticed a fair number of Harvard & Yale failures during the TFG reign of error.
(eta Dartmouth, too, via J R there.)
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
The only problem with the hybrid model is that it’s front wheel drive only. The All wheel drive truck uses an in-line 4-cyl engine, I would assume it gets pretty good mileage for a truck, but probably not close to the 42 mpg the hybrid power train gets.
Many years ago we had a tiny VW Rabbit PU truck, which did get around 45-50 MPG of diesel fuel. It was OK, but I was 6′ tall at the time, and it wasn’t really comfortable for me to drive. They basically cut the Rabbit body off right behind the driver’s seat and built a box on top of the rear end. AM/FM radio was the only delux part… and a block heater so you could get it to start in the wintertime.
Omnes Omnibus
@J R in WV: Michelle Malkin graduated from Oberlin. Just saying.
Starfish
@Kay: The conversation about standardized testing is interesting.
Some screaming on the topic of common core had to do with how the breadth of education was being reduced to teach to the test. For example, Mississippi improved their literacy by a lot. That is because they cut things like science. A lot of the older conservatives were spreading “Bring back cursive” memes on Facebook. My child did something on cursive, but not nearly as much as we did. His print is not great, and he prefers to type.
Some focus on common core and on equity is killing off talented and gifted programs. I can’t tell if these programs should be dead or not. Smart kids being bored and disruptive is not the outcome you really want.
I am not sure that asking teachers to have more advanced degrees and also taking away a lot of their autonomy in the classroom is great. How much class time should be a fixed curriculum? Should that curriculum be set at the federal, state, school district, school or class level?
The testing companies are sure getting a lot of education dollars from all this testing.
When I was a child, we had standardized testing once every few years. I think that my child goes through a testing for the state at the end of the year. He may do two or three testings for the district a year. He is also doing the pre-test, post-test in the classroom for whatever they are studying. That last one is a teacher’s best guess at how well kids are doing. The other tests are so that the district and the state can track metrics. Is taking that many tests a year in the interest of the students? Is it conveying meaningful information to the district or the state?
J R in WV
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wholly Bovine Byproduct, Omnes!! Who knew??!! And thanks for that interesting datum! Do you suspect she goes to the class reunions?
Not really a surprise, tho. There were plenty of RWNJs in Dickenson back in 1968-69 and it is a real liberal arts school. Antioch was pretty purely liberals all the way across, tho!!
My uncle went to Dartmouth back before WW II, and he turned out to be a socialist thru and thru. So
maybesurely it has changed a lot in the past 80 years…taumaturgo
No surprise white fragility is slashing out at the latest racist dog whistle about CRT. For those who care you’ll find there is a long history of pillage, plunder, and terrorism against the hint of blacks asking for equal rights. All segments of white society at some level or another accepts a modicum of segregation from the others. White folk’s alarm over CRT is mainly due because it reminds them of what they are.
Cacti
He shouldn’t have resigned.
Jinchi
The problem til now has been that no-one really knew what CRT meant (not even Tucker Carlson, apparently), so voters were left to fill the gap with whatever horror fantasy they could come up with.
Now that we’ve seen the ‘anti-CRT’ laws in action, it should be pretty straightforward to counter the right-wing campaign. Whenever a Republican candidate goes off on ‘banning CRT’ from the schools, their Democratic opponent needs to respond that they absolutely believe that students should learn about the Holocaust, the defeat of slavery in the civil war, and the end of legalized segregation in the 1960s, and that people like Rosa Parks and MLK are as fundamental a part of our history as any civil war general.
Create a list of everything that’s been banned in the short period these laws have been in place and ask the right winger which ones he truly opposed.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: I sometimes feel guilty for staying 3 miles this side of the state line where my vote counts about as much as a fart in a windstorm for swinging national politics… but God damn, sometimes I’m reminded of why.
Geminid
@OzarkHillbilly: You are right. Also, I think Ms. Jay advocates saying in effect, “They are lying,” not “You are lying.” The point is to persuade the 90% of people who only now are hearing about this bogus problem that it is nonsense and harms children’s education.
It might be worth directly debating the people pushing the CRT panic if they were arguing in good faith, but they’re not.
Hope your shoulder is doing OK, and that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of it.
Kay
@Starfish:
Up for discussion with me! They shouldn’t be overtested. But I want an objective benchmark- flawed as it is- to mitigate the effect of subjective assessments made by individuals who are biased because we already know subjective decisions introduce bias. The discipline disparity between white kids and black kids? How black kids are disciplined more harshly in public schools than white kids are for the same set of offenses? How we make snap assessments of people based on how they dress or look? So just give me one standardized test a year, play it down so it’s not the be-all and end-all and I’m satisified.
There are a whole group of lower middle and low income kids who go to mediocre public schools who absolutely benefit from the ACT. They score high (or high enough) and that’s the key for them. We can serve them without harming others.
It’s always a struggle to balance the benefits of objective assessment (less subjective, less biased) with the downside (reductive and maybe exclusionary) but we’re smart enough to do that. We can walk and chew gum.
Wapiti
@UncleEbeneezer: The choice we seem to be facing is between (a) racist white vigilantes killing people or (b) racist cops killing people.
Matt
I hope he sues every member of the Board of Trustees personally and wins. Take their cars, their houses, their pensions, every goddamn thing they have.
After all, since conservatives ASSURE us that systematic racism doesn’t exist, the only explanation of the board’s actions is personal racial animus. Fuck every one of these peckerwood clowns.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The universities, for all their faults, are the one sector of American culture where outraged conservatives don’t have a complete hammerlock on the scope of allowed discourse. It’s rule or ruin.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
The education agenda wasn’t popular. They had to attach the whole fucking thing to a must-pass budget bill to jam it through. I’m not sure the anti-woke crowd drawing all this attention to New Hampshire’s new far Right education agenda is doing Republicans there any favors.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: A lot of hybrids now are big SUVs or trucks that basically use the hybrid tech to get the beast’s fuel efficiency up to the level of a conventional sedan. I’d scoff, but since we achieve the biggest fuel/emission savings across the whole fleet by improving the worst offenders, it’s a better deal than one might expect.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: What I notice about NH is that as soon as you cross over the line, you start seeing mom-and-pop businesses with an electronic sign out front where the owners feel compelled to mix irrelevant Randite, anti-tax or conspiracy rants in with messages about the actual business. It’s completely weird but it’s a normal thing there, and I assume it’s not that bad for business. It’s more or less what they have in place of “Christian” signaling.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
Here are the 5 most popular college majors based on NCES data.
Wokedy-woke-woke. If they want to complain about liberal arts at elite colleges then do that. Talking about the “higher education system” requires talking about the one that exists that most people use.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay:
They spend all day in a very small very masturbatory echo chamber. I suppose it’s possible somebody emails talking points, but I follow a couple less-execrable ones to keep up to speed and you can pretty much guess what they’re gonna say about any given thing. It’s sad really.
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
I think it’s their belief in the unique or “forbidden” nature of their views – a belief that isn’t justified. So they’ll say this kind of banal, fuzzy political… thing “you know, abolishing the police could lead to vigilantes” (no shit, that’s a brilliant connection you made there) and think they’re alone in that. But they should read one another. Because they’re all saying the same things. “Abolishing the police” was not, in fact, the majority view among liberals so being opposed to it is not “forbidden”, it’s the norm.
gwangung
@Kay:
Business are conservative leaning. So is engineering. So is medicine. Physical sciences half and half. Econ is definitely conservative.
The only part that really leans liberal or progressive are the humanities. So, yeah…be specific if you wanna complain about liberals. The biz/engineering/medical fields are not that liberal and they’re definitely not ivory towers….
Kelly
In reliably blue Oregon:
After some arguments about racist shit in Newburg a reactionary majority of the school board elected in May fired their superintendent. No cause given. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/11/10/newberg-school-board-votes-to-fire-superintendent-no-cause-given/
After arguments about masks and some racist shit in Albany three newly elected members of the school board fired their superintendent. No cause given. https://www.opb.org/article/2021/07/16/albany-oregon-superindendent-fired-covid-19-race-culture-wars/
In Adrian a small community bordering Idaho the school board fired the superintendent for following the the law, enforcing Oregon’s mask mandate. https://www.malheurenterprise.com/posts/8843/adrian-school-board-fires-superintendent-for-obeying-states-mask-mandate
Kay
@Major Major Major Major:
If you wanted to look at whether college students are being indoctrinated into Marxism would you look at a. the two opinion polls that (maybe) indicated that a sample of them “feel” censored or b. what they major in- the collected actual expression of the courses they choose to take and they jobs they’re pursuing? I’m going with b.
cain
@RosiesDad:
My fiance has gone from kindergarten teacher to be on track for principal – she’s being groomed for the position – but what she has been doing so far is creating content that provides an equitable view of social studies from all perspectives and not just the white one. This is what all these assholes are feeling threatened – like we are going to shame them.
I’m not sure what what they think – we can’t talk about slavery or any other thing? How do you address things or improve things if we can’t talk about things that have gone wrong. Do parents not talk to their children about things they’ve done wrong of parents have done wrong? Is that indoctrination ?
Anyways, the two of us are gearing up for some malicious shit that is going to happen. Luckily her school district is 80% non-white. So it’s not going to get much traction as it would be in Texas.
Also fuck Texas.
Major Major Major Major
@Kay: yeah that’s a big part too. Like everybody else they think they’re special, unlike many people they have low agreeableness and even more unlike most such people they revel in it. ?
Martin
First they came for the election workers, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a election worker.
Then they came for the school principals, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a school principal.
I know this is an overused mechanism, but these people really are fascists and they are escalating faster than Dems are finding the nerve to reign them in through criminal accountability.
Kristine
@Kelly:
It’s always been my understanding that Oregon is like Washington–it’s gets redder and redder the farther you get from the coast.
Visited folks a few years ago who warned me about Newberg. Very conservative.
Hell, southern Illinois is red. I hear occasional rumbles about secession.
NotMax
@SteveinPHX
Presume you already hang out at this place.
dopey-o
I maintain that a better framing would have been:
“HELP the Police!
“Our cops are too valuable to have their time wasted dealing with domestic violence, homelessness and mental health crises!
“Free them up to do their jobs! Send social workers and psychiatric intervention. Help the Police!”
And then let’s see Tucker Carlson spin that into “Radical woke lefty agitators want to help the police. Commies! Boogity-boogity-boo!”
Nettoyeur
@UncleEbeneezer: But he lost NH.
debbie
@cain:
Make sure she’s ready to push back against outsiders. They’re who are really raising the stink.
Ryan
Your kids have been home for 18 months. YOU’VE been at home for 18 months. If CRT was a thing being taught in school, how come you never heard it during the pandemic?
Barry
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: “One wonders how easily it will be to get a replacement principle after that. From what I gather being a Principal is a rough enough job as it is, add in community full of Celtuses and Karens who decided school admin is their current victim after Target banned them and that’s sounds like it’s not worth it.”
Right-wing [email protected] trhive in that environment.
Kristine
@Ryan:
My guess would be that the anti-wokes would claim that the CRT pushers altered their lesson plans to cover their tracks. Forget how much work would be involved to do this. If logic played a part in any of this, it wouldn’t have blown up in the first place.
UncleEbeneezer
@dopey-o: Sure. And that is exactly the framing that people who advocate for increasing social services and having unarmed crisis teams etc., use. They don’t always work but I think they are good, personally.
Mike G
Howdy Arabia.