Education

A water drop and ripples

Teachers unions shouldn’t be training members on how to subvert “parent groups.”

By Justin Katz | September 20, 2021 |

A story in Not the Bee about a teachers union seminar about handling “nice white parents” comes out of Pennsylvania, but one can be sure that Rhode Island unions are talking about how to “limit the power” of “parent groups.” This should be broadly scandalous, which may indicate that most unions across the country have been smart…

Parents have to stand up for their kids’ rights, as they’re doing in Rhode Island, but beware the judiciary and media.

By Justin Katz | September 17, 2021 |

It’s encouraging to see that some families in Rhode Island have had enough and are willing to take to court to defend their civil rights, as Kim Kalunian reports on WPRI: Sixteen parents and grandparents have filed a lawsuit against Gov. Dan McKee over his statewide school mask mandate. The complaint, filed in Providence Superior…

Ray Rickman and Mike Stenhouse on State of the State

State of the State: Ray Rickman for RI Senate

By Mike Stenhouse | September 15, 2021 |

Ray Rickman and Mike Stenhouse discuss Rickman’s experience and plans if he’s elected to the state Senate.

Racist Democrat Party poster from the Civil War era

A prime example of controlling the present to control the past to control the future.

By Justin Katz | September 15, 2021 |

Owing to the fact that a local union official and I have the same name, I’ve been peripherally following a controversy in Boca Raton, Florida, involving an unnamed teacher who was suspended for showing his high school history class Civil War–era political imagery, including the one used as the featured image for this post.  These…

Dan McKee gets vaccinated

McKee needs to start inoculating his decisions against the symptoms of cronyism.

By Justin Katz | September 13, 2021 |

How Democrat Governor Dan McKee handled the awarding of a $5 million education-related contract to a group of his friends and allies has been a disaster, giving his opposition a wide-open window through which to pepper him with political arrows, but I’m withholding judgment on the action itself.  This paragraph from Patrick Anderson’s Providence Journal article on…

A water drop and ripples

State Senator Alana DiMario is right, you know.

By Justin Katz | September 9, 2021 |

We should definitely reduce the ridiculously long quarantine timeline.

A high school privilege walk

“Privilege walking” Providence teachers is like an identity politics perp walk.

By Justin Katz | September 7, 2021 |

Yesterday, Providence middle school teacher Ramona Bessinger posted on Facebook that her school principal conducted an ostensibly voluntary “privilege walk” using materials from Project Implicit: At school last week, the faculty was asked to “opt-in” to take a “privilege walk”. Needless to say, I opted-out. I’d rather spend my professional hours on lesson plans for…

A water drop and ripples

Teachers unions are the face of the arrogance of power.

By Justin Katz | September 6, 2021 |

From a GQ Pan article in the Epoch Times: The leader of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents more than 30,000 employees in the nation’s second largest public school district, said in a recently published interview that learning losses during the pandemic are a myth. “There’s no such thing as learning loss,” UTLA President Cecily…

Fingers crossed

What are the mechanics of a school department lying to a student’s parents?

By Justin Katz | September 3, 2021 |

In the Valley Breeze, Erika Sanzi writes about a relatively recent practice of Rhode Island school districts that has bothered me since the state Department of Education injected it into our system some years ago:  the policy for teachers and school officials to deliberately lie to parents as the system helps a child to “transition” from…

A water drop and ripples

A passing thought on critical race theory in education.

By Justin Katz | September 2, 2021 |

I’ll be writing about the details in an ongoing way, but for the moment, I had to pause and express an observation from reading some of the materials for embedding critical race theory (CRT) in education.  There are people with tremendous influence in the industry who are probably clinically psychotic and, in any event, should…