When Education Becomes Perverted

 “If you’re not straight, white, and conservative, it doesn’t feel safe” - Raineesha Day, California teacher.

Having had a career as a teacher, I have always believed in educations's mitigating effects: it can help bridge the gap between ignorance and critical thinking and can mean the difference between poverty and economic stability. Most importantly, it can contribute to citizens' healthy, knowledgeable participation in their democracy.

But all of those benefits are predicated on an education system that is honest and earnest, that sees itself as a conveyor of truth rather than a weapon to promote ignorance. Sadly, both in Canada and the United States, as I have written in many posts, it is the latter that often prevails today.

In The Guardian, Robin Buller writes about a deplorable situation in California where education has become weaponized by a right-wing faction.

The small southern California city of Temecula made headlines across the US when its school board banned critical race theory and attempted to purge elementary school textbooks that reference gay rights icon Harvey Milk.

On Wednesday, a group of parents, students, teachers and a union sued the Temecula valley school district, alleging the critical race theory ban violates California law, the right to due process and the right to be free from discrimination. If the court rules in their favor, lawyers on the case say it will set a new precedent for the right to fact-based education in California public schools.

 It appears that the real problems began during the pandemic, when parents objected to school mask mandates. As we know from our own experience, that brought out the extremists who, in this case, managed to elect three board members who appear to believe that ignorance is bliss. Homosexual icons like Harvey Milk and so-called Critical Race Theory wound up being banned.

In the spring of 2022, three new school board candidates – Danny Gonzalez, Joseph Komrosky and Jen Wiersma – ran on platforms that opposed masking and vaccine requirements, accused the teacher’s union of working against parents’ interests, and suggested standard curriculum had been replaced by “sexualized” material. 

 The developments echoed those in other parts of California and across the country.

Reshaping suburban school boards was part of a national Republican strategy in 2022 to energize voters. Often, those interventions were funded by national conservative groups with deep pockets, like Moms for Liberty, the American Council and Turning Point USA. The campaigns of Komrosky, Gonzalez and Wiersma were financed by the Inland Empire Family Pac, which is headed by a local evangelical pastor.

And such repression has real-life consequences.

In past years, homophobic and white supremacist graffiti has been scrawled in public spaces, football fans at the local high school have greeted a visiting team with loud racist taunts, and a mayor was forced to resign following the release of emails in which he made racist remarks about police violence against people of color.

Tuesday Cortes, a 16-year-old queer student, 

... said she was bullied for her sexuality throughout middle school, with limited intervention from school administrators. In eighth grade, Cortes said, classmates chanted “there’s only two genders” during recess and mocked her for her short hair.  

Black parents have also been made understandably uneasy by statements from the board such is this:

...board member Komrosky called CRT a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. Gonzalez and Wiersma did not respond to questions.

The only real brights spots here is the fact that sane and reasonable people are fighting back against the unhinged through the lawsuit that has been filed. That, and the fact that both parents and people like Cortes are unbowed.

[Involved parent Jennifer] San Nichols and others say the events will not push them out of Temecula. If anything, the ban has had the opposite effect, bolstering their activism.

“The harder they try to suppress us, the harder Black and Brown parents will push back,” said [Christina] Johnson, the mother of three. “I am staying for as long as I can.”

The final word goes to Cortes, who correctly identifies the poison that ignorance can engender:

...ensuring that the history of gay rights is taught in school is a critical part of preventing anti-LGBTQ+ bullying. “If queer history isn’t available to learn, we will never progress and people will stay full of hatred and ignorance,” she said.

 

 

 

 

 

The Erosion Of Educational Integrity

I rarely write directly about education these days, now that I am several years into retirement and believe that dwelling upon the past can be unhealthy. Every so often, however, a story comes along that causes me to relive some of the sleazy politicization that continues to erode educational integrity to this very day.

Thanks to a link sent to me by my son, who is now living in Alberta, I read a story reported by CBC about an Edmonton high school physics teacher who has been suspended for giving zeroes on uncompleted assignments or exams:

Lynden Dorval, a physics teacher at Ross Sheppard High School, has been giving the mark for work that wasn't handed in or tests not taken even though it goes against the school's "no-zero" policy.

The thinking behind the policy is that failing to complete assignments is a behavioural issue and marks should reflect ability, not behaviour.

Dorval said he couldn't in good conscience comply with the rule.

Towards the end of my career in Ontario, we were moving toward a similar policy, but at the time of my retirement, many of us were still practising what we called a 'drop-dead date' beyond which late work could not be submitted and would be assigned a zero. However, for me the proverbial line in the sand, one upon which I was never actually tested, was the Ontario Ministry guideline that described plagiarism as a behaviourial issue and that students should be given opportunities to do makeup work.

While some teachers actually provided such opportunities, it was, in my time still only a guideline and not school policy. I vowed to myself that I would never submit to such a stipulation, and fortunately, like the teacher in the Edmonton story, was close enough to retirement to have been able to stay true to my principles had an administrative ultimatum been issued.

And what foundational principle was so important to me that I would have put my job on the line? It was that I would never reward academic dishonesty as if it were a mere slip of judgement, a quirk or peccadillo easily remediated by second and third chances.

And my reasoning was simple: to give makeup chances to errant students was to simply encourage academic dishonesty, since there would be no real consequences for committing what used to be considered a grave academic crime. It also would have mocked the majority of students who were hardworking and earnest in their efforts. That was something I could not live with.

So, as my friend Dom, also a retired teacher, says about those who promote such inane policies, 'educational principles' are now in the hands of the resume-builders, those whose concerns for quality in education are at the very least a distant second, far behind their insatiable appetite for career-advancement.

You can perhaps appreciate why I prefer not to revisit "the good old days' too often.

P.S. If you read the CBC story, be sure to note the student reactions to Lynden Dorval's suspension, especially the first two.