In the course of my inquiries about the Equity Institute’s activities in the Portsmouth school system, I received this statement from Superintendent Thomas Kenworthy:
The Portsmouth School Department contracted with the Equity Institute last spring to conduct a third-party analysis that we can use to inform our work around equity. We have a Strategic Plan goal connected to ensuring equitable opportunities for all students and were at the point last year where we felt we needed this type of third-party review to inform our work. The report we receive will be reviewed and we as a district will determine what steps we take from there. There are very few organizations that could do this analysis and meet all of the guidelines we would insist on around transparency and a vetted methodology. The Equity Institute came highly recommended by several local districts that had worked with them. We have a signed agreement, reviewed and approved by our school department attorney, that safeguards student privacy and ensures that all state and federal guidelines applicable to conducting student surveys will be followed. Student survey questions were reviewed over the course of three community forum sessions. The Equity Institute took that community feedback into account before finalizing the questions being used for our Portsmouth analysis. Parents have been given the opportunity to both request to preview student survey questions and opt their child out of taking the survey.
I had asked whether (1) he thought it appropriate that the public could not review the surveys, whether (2) the aggressive secrecy of the Equity Institute concerned him, and whether (3) he thought bringing up notions of “gender non-conformance” with children as young as eight is appropriate. His answer, shown above, is essentially, “We want this as a school department and followed all the appropriate processes.”
Kenworthy’s response provides an important reminder for those of us who find this Balkanizing, racist trend in elementary and secondary schools disturbing. They really do think they’re doing important work and that we only object because of our unsavory biases. We will get no concessions, and they aren’t going to stop.
If you want it to stop, you are going to have to remove them from office, from the bottom to the top. That won’t be easy, and many families would be better off putting their money where their beliefs are and exiting the system.
The Portsmouth school system is down 192 students since the 2018-2019 school year. That’s 8%. Since its enrollment peak within the window of the state’s online data, during the 2003-2004 school year, enrollment is down 27% — more than one-quarter of all students, gone.
The district’s budget has not gone down, however. The earliest audit available on the town’s website is for the 2007-2008 school year, when the total school unrestricted expenditures totaled $33,451,958 (pg. 54). The most recent available audit is for 2019-2020, and it reports that numbers as $39,580,635. This 18% increase in spending combines with the decrease in enrollment over the same period for an increase in per-student spending of 44%! Would anybody claim this has corresponded with an increase in student results?
These are not the public schools in which we were educated. They’re not even the public schools they were five or 10 years ago. For the sake of our communities, we have to save them, but families should look to their own children first.
Featured image by Vahid Moeini Jazani on Unsplash.
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In keeping with my earlier post about being open to contextual details that may change how we ought to feel about events, note a bit of information from former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles (about halfway down this page), concerning an article she wrote about the devastation to small businesses in Kenosha, which the paper’s editors deliberately held until after the election:
Eventually the election passed. Biden was in the White House. And my Kenosha story ran. Whatever the reason for holding the piece, covering the suffering after the riots was not a priority. The reality that brought Kyle Rittenhouse into the streets was one we reporters were meant to ignore. The old man who tried to put out a blaze at a Kenosha store had his jaw broken. The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign in June 2020 amid staff outcry for publishing a piece with the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.”
The elites are crafting a narrative to keep themselves in power.
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We’re in divided times and are being pressed to take sides and choose narratives. We’re vulnerable, because such things are very much in our nature, and it can be difficult to have a healthy skepticism of people we perceive as our friends and allies, or to give the benefit of the doubt to the Others.
Fully understanding that this is conveniently in line with my own biases, I would ask my fellow Rhode Islanders, here behind the Blue Curtain, to consider various very significant narratives that have proven false, appear to be proving false, and may surprise them by proving false in the future.
Maybe the most prominent, at the moment, has to do with Kyle Rittenhouse. Here’s Bari Weiss on that subject:
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
She goes on to explain.
Another big one is the Steele dossier, which gave the media and Democrats pretense to spend years attacking and undermining the President of the United States. Here’s Marshall Cohen, on CNN, of all places:
Trump swiftly rejected Steele’s claims and said a “group of opponents … put that crap together.” Nearly five years later, it’s clearer than ever that he wasn’t too far off about the origins of the dossier.
Two special counsel investigations, multiple congressional inquiries, civil lawsuits in the US and the United Kingdom, and an internal Justice Department review have now fully unspooled the behind-the-scenes role that some Democrats played in this saga. They paid for the research, funneled information to Steele’s sources, and then urged the FBI to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
If you’re still with me, maybe you’re willing to acknowledge that these are examples of misunderstanding and/or trickery. Will you consider that some other matters of similar narrative importance may yet join this growing list?
For instance, even I was a little shaken to read Julie Kelly’s article in American Greatness giving details about the hottest of hotspots at the Capitol Building on January 6:
These assaults occurred about 10 minutes before the lifeless body of Rosanne Boyland was seen lying on the ground, just outside the tunnel. Most of the violent brawls between police and protesters take place near this tunnel in response to what McBride calls “overwhelming police brutality and misconduct.”
Body-worn camera footage released by the courts and seen here show Boyland on her side not moving as her friend, Justin Winchell, begged for help. “She’s gonna die!” Winchell tries to scream while holding on to Boyland. He turns to the crowd. “I need somebody, anybody,” he pleads. “She’s dead! She’s dead!”
Kelly describes the police actions blow by blow and reports that the Boyland’s body disappeared behind police lines and was never seen again.
On January 12, I watched hours of video and argued that there wasn’t a single story of January 6. From most angles, it certainly looked more like a large crowd with a relatively small number of people causing trouble. The entrance around the tunnel that Kelly describes was the major exception. At the time, the mainstream media, like the New York Times, insisted that Boyland died “after being crushed by a mob,” and horrifying footage showed an officer being dragged down the stairs.
What if even that wasn’t the full story? Unequivocally, we can affirm that the civilians should not have assaulted the officers and should be prosecuted for doing so, but a vast field of possibilities exists between acknowledging that they were not innocents and treating the day as an organized insurgency. After all, we pay and deploy public safety personnel to be the professionals who manage the behavior of ordinary citizens in dangerous situations, so we should be open to the possibility that they bear some responsibility for failing to maintain order and perhaps even instigating a reaction.
It’s important for us to know what happened and why, and to do that, we have to be prepared to adjust our narrative.
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I’m not sure this is the way to a solution:
A bipartisan collective of House lawmakers introduced legislation on Nov. 9 that would require Big Tech providers such as Facebook and Google to allow users to opt-out of content selected by algorithms, providing additional transparency regarding content.
The measure, dubbed the Filter Bubble Transparency Act in the House (pdf), would make platforms with more than 1 million users and $50 million in annual revenue notify users of algorithm usage and allow users to determine settings.
Politicians shouldn’t be coming up with solutions and tweaking the services of private companies. Again, the emphasis of government should be on safeguarding rights, not on regulating an industry to conform with lawmakers’ sense of fairness.
Rather than require businesses to provide features — which the tech folks will find ways around faster than government can regulate them, and which will create barriers to the real solution, which is competition — government should emphasize prevention of fraud. In this case, that would probably mean allowing users to access information about how an algorithm is affecting them. Then let consumers, providers, and the courts sort it out.
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Look, nobody should be surprised that Governor Dan McKee’s administration has apparently agreed to give members of state employees’ biggest labor union $3,000 for full vaccination status. That’s how this works. If you’re in the private sector, government gives you the choice of being vaccinated or losing your job. If you’re in the public sector, you get a bonus for doing things most people were going to do anyway.
Biden and Congressional Democrats poured money into state and local governments, and so people who have every advantage in government will… take advantage.
This is just the same scam they are continually running.
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Mike Stenhouse invited me on his In the Dugout show, yesterday, to talk about the state Department of Health’s use of fidget spinners to seed the schools of Rhode Island with a desire for vaccination.
Click here for the full episode.
Click here for the segment in which I appeared.
The RI Department of Labor and Training’s headline for monthly employment data tells some of the bad story: “Rhode Island-Based Jobs Fell by 2,100 from September; October Unemployment Rate Increases to 5.4 Percent“:
Total nonfarm payroll employment in Rhode Island totaled 479,200 in October, reflecting a loss of 2,100 jobs from the revised September job count of 481,300. The monthly job loss in October marks the first job loss since December 2020.
That isn’t all, though. The number of Rhode Islanders who say they are employed (which includes those working out of state and those working for themselves) was 522,100, while the number who say they are either employed or looking for work (i.e., the “labor force”) was 551,700.
Curiously, the press release mentions that these numbers are up 25,200 and 15,800 from the same month last year, but they don’t say how they compare with the month before. Wonder why.
Perhaps it’s because the state didn’t want to point out that the preliminary number for employment the month before was 547,116, indicating 25,016 fewer working Rhode Islanders in October than in September. Meanwhile, the labor force fell by 25,528.
In fairness to the PR team, something is probably fishy with these numbers. As currently reported at that link, the September numbers were way, way up from the August numbers — 43,330 when it comes to employment.
Thus, the bad news of the jobs losses is compounded by the bad news that we can’t really trust the numbers by which we gauge our sense of how well our economy is doing.
Featured image by The Blowup on Unsplash.
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Cal Newport describes an interesting natural experiment created by the way Facebook rolled out from one campus to the next:
The authors of this paper connect a dataset containing the dates when Facebook was introduced to 775 different colleges with answers from seventeen consecutive waves of the National College Health Assessment (NCHA), a comprehensive and longstanding survey of student mental health.
Using a statistical technique called difference in differences, the researchers quantified changes in the mental health status of students right before and right after they were given access to Facebook.
They found that the effect was about one-fifth as large as losing your job, which is (let’s say) pretty big.
I’m not sure we can stop this train now, however, which suggests the importance of the other side of that comparison. Some people lose their job and fall apart, while others set to work to wind up in an even better place. Just so, social media can create huge opportunities; we just have to learn (and teach our children) to manage it.
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Problems with Rhode Island’s health care industry indicate an across-the-board failure of government management. Remember when they shut down our economy to avoid overwhelming our medical infrastructure? Well, that move — and all that came after it — may be resulting in a much more intractable, longer-term failure.
Want to count the ways?
One. Staff at facilities are stressed, overburdened, and facing undue restrictions.
The most emblematic restriction, of course, is the mandate that all health care workers must be vaccinated, regardless of individual circumstances. This policy could have come straight from the classic movie, Idiocracy. Officials knew about staffing challenges beforehand, and yet chose to take the hardest possible line, refusing to make any enduring accommodations whatsoever.
But that policy is only emblematic. Our regulatory system (along with labor union priority) has long been overly restrictive, emphasizing government control over adaptability and actual need. Government and politics simply are not capable of micromanaging complex systems.
Two. Lockdowns and the constant drumbeat of doom are doing huge damage to all of our mental health.
Note this, from the above-linked Boston Globe article by Alexa Gagosz:
“But what we are also seeing, in addition to our sick medical patients, is an increase in the number of behavioral health patients, including behavioral health pediatric patients and that’s because of a lack of beds for them — not just at Landmark,” [Dr. Matthew] Sarasin said. “And they’re staying in the emergency department longer.”
Increases in overdoses and suicides are only the extreme tips of a much larger problem. We can bet that they indicate large increases in various stages of substance abuse, depression, stress, and other markers of mental unhealth.
Three. Restrictions and fear kept people from taking addressing problems sooner.
In addition to increased mental health problems, our government’s response to COVID kept people out of doctors’ offices and hospitals for regular checkups and screenings as well as non-emergency surgery and treatments. There’s a reason we do those things, and we’re going to be dealing with the consequences of taking a break from them for decades to come.
That is one reason forbidding hospitals from providing non-emergency services as punishment for continuing to schedule unvaccinated staff is so crazy that even the characters of Idiocracy wouldn’t have thought it reasonable.
As the government and news media ramp up their irresponsible hysteria for COVID 3, The Relapse, it is going to be up to the public to be the rational adults. We must insist that government and its satellites stop pretending they can come up with the answers and therefore should have the responsibility. They can’t, and they shouldn’t.
Sorry, folks, but that means only you can and only you should.
Featured image by Daniel Adesina on Unsplash.
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In South Carolina, school districts and now the governor have taken parental concerns about explicit material in school libraries, as Matt McGregor reports for The Epoch Times:
“It has come to my attention that public schools in South Carolina may be providing students with access—whether in school libraries, electronic databases, or both—to completely inappropriate books and materials, including sexually explicit and obscene images or depictions,” [Governor Henry] McMaster said in a memorandum to the South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) on Wednesday.
McMaster referred to an incident in the Fort Mill School District in which he said parents petitioned to remove “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe.
In Rhode Island, by contrast, North Kingstown Superintendent Philip Auger insists the book supports “the overall health and well being [of] LGBTQ youth.”
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