Category Archives: News

News

Teacher union president explains how he covers up for abusive teachers

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Education spending has tripled since 1970
Education spending has tripled since 1970

In a previous post, I explained four reasons why education is so expensive, despite the fact that teachers produce underperforming students. But one factor was not mentioned, namely that it is nearly impossible to fire underperforming teachers. The teacher unions prevents teachers from being fired, even for criminal behavior.

The Daily Wire reports on a new Project Veritas video.

Here’s the video:

And the article says:

A new video from Project Veritas shows a New Jersey teachers union president explaining the methods he would use to cover for a teacher if the teacher physically or verbally abused their student.

Undercover employees for Project Veritas taped Hamilton Township Education Association President David Perry asserting he would misrepresent the events of altercations between teachers and students by back-dating reports as well as urging the teacher to remain silent about what happened.

Perry also stated that if a teacher abused their student, they should go to the union where a report could be created protecting them from students asserting that they had been abused.

Some sample quotes from Perry:

I got people who are on drugs. And she, five times she was fired, and I got her job back five times.

If nobody brings it up from school, I don’t say boo.

Interviewer: So, after a certain point, the cameras are erased. Perry: Exactly. That’s why I would never want to bring it up. The longer we wait, the longer there’s no cameras.

Now, if you go to the house of the board of education and report this, they’re going to call the police, call parents and all that s***. We don’t do that. We don’t do that here. I’m here to defend even the worst people.

But I don’t want him coming in here with a bunch of lies. We need to know the truth so we can bend the truth.

When I see teachers holding signs, demanding more salary and benefits, the first thing I think of is how they want all of these things regardless of performance. Because no matter how poorly they perform, it’s almost impossible to fire them. The union protects them. They’re not asking for more money because they’ve done a good job. They don’t have to do a good job in order to continue to be employed.

Here’s an example of how unions protect poorly-performing teachers from parents (their customers!), reported by the radically leftist CNN:

Former teacher Charlene Schmitz is behind bars in a federal detention center in Tallahassee, Florida, serving 10 years for using texts and instant messages to seduce a 14-year-old student.

She has been fired from her job as a reading teacher at the high school in Leroy, Alabama.

But she is still collecting a paycheck.

Schmitz is appealing her federal conviction — and her firing. State charges filed in connection with the case are pending. Under the law in Alabama, she is still entitled to her $51,000-a-year salary while she appeals her firing.

She’s a “reading teacher”. Sigh.

If you think that’s the exception, you should know that many, many teachers are kept in “rubber rooms”, where they are paid their full teacher salary long after they have been banned from teaching for various crimes and abuses.

NBC News reports:

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

“You just basically sit there for eight hours,” said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. “I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.’ `I’ve been sitting here for six months.’ That sort of thing.”

[…]Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

“It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract,” spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

This is why we need to break up the government monopoly on education, abolish the federal Department of Education, break up the teacher unions, and put vouchers for education in the hands of parents. The only way this corrupt system is going to be fixed is to hand parents the money to choose their schools, and have schools and teachers have public reviews – like what you see on Amazon or Google reviews or Yelp. Teachers should all have to complete two years of full-time work in the private sector for whatever it is that they want to teach – to prove that they are at least capable of keeping a job where they can actually be fired for underperforming. Once parents are empowered to move their children around to get the best education (and to pay more to the best teachers and schools), then good teachers will be paid what they are worth, and bad teachers will be fired, and bad schools will close. This will raise the quality of education for EVERY student.

News

New study: faculty ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans is 12 to 1

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The Daily Wire reports on the political convictions of the people who are being paid tens of thousands of dollars to “educate” our children.

Excerpt:

An extensive study of 8,688 tenure-track professors at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in the U.S. published by the National Association of Scholars found that the ratio of faculty members registered as Democrats compared to those registered Republican is now a stunning 10.4 to 1. If two military colleges that are technically described as “liberal arts colleges” are removed from the calculations, the ratio is 12.7 to 1.

The researcher, Mitchell Langbert, Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College, found that nearly 40% of the colleges in the study had zero faculty members who were registered Republican. Not a single one. Nearly 80% of the 51 colleges had so few Republican faculty members that they were statistically insignificant.

There is virtually zero ideological diversity, and that’s how the university administrators want it. They know that young people are peer-driven and eager to conform to their elders, and they want to be sure that the environment at university produces little progressives. Critical thinking isn’t a concern, ideological purity and adherence to dogma is their overriding concern. And they achieve their goal by discriminating against conservative students and faculty and Christian students and faculty. This is the REAL discrimination that open-minded, tolerant people should be concerned about. But since it’s discrimination by progressives, no one is concerned about it. Not even the taxpayers paying the salaries of these overgrown children.

Now, on this blog, I have repeatedly told people two things. First of all, it’s important that you don’t go to university unless you are going into a STEM field. Anything else is just a waste of money. Second, you can save money by doing the first two years at a community college and then transferring.

Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)
Starting and Mid-Career salaries by profession (click for larger image)

The first rule is there not just because the highest paying jobs are in STEM, but because STEM is also the least dominated by progressive dogma, inside and outside the university.

More:

When Langbert broke down the political affiliations by field, he found some clear and rather unsurprising trends: by far the highest imbalance is found in the more ideological fields, in particular the social sciences and humanities:

The STEM subjects, such as chemistry, economics, mathematics, and physics, have lower D:R ratios than the social sciences and humanities. The highest D:R ratio of all is for the most ideological field: interdisciplinary studies. I could not find a single Republican with an exclusive appointment to fields like gender studies, Africana studies, and peace studies. As Fabio Rojas describes with respect to Africana or Black studies, these fields had their roots in ideologically motivated political movements that crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s.

Langbert found the following ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the key academic fields (ordered from most biased to most balanced):

  • Communications – 108 to 0 (no registered Republicans)
  • Anthropology – 56 to 0 (no registered Republicans)
  • Religion – 70:1
  • English – 48.3:1
  • Sociology – 43.8:1
  • Art – 40.3:1
  • Music – 32.8:1
  • Theater – 29.5:1
  • Classics – 27.3:1
  • Geoscience – 27:1
  • Environmental – 25.3:1
  • Language – 21.1:1
  • Biology – 20.8:1
  • Philosophy – 17.5:1
  • History – 17.4:1
  • Psychology – 16.8:1
  • Poli Sci – 8.2:1
  • Computers – 6.3:1
  • Physics – 6.2:1
  • Mathematics – 5.6:1
  • Professional – 5.5:1
  • Economics – 5.5:1
  • Chemistry – 5.2:1
  • Engineering – 1.6:1

It’s very important that we learn something from this list: Democrats don’t likely to test their ideas against reality. The fields that are dominated by Democrats are the ones that involve the least hard work, the least thinking, the least testing of reality, the least production of goods and services that others will want to buy. Democrats go into these fields precisely because it allows them to paint a picture of themselves as good people using words, but without having to do any work that would allow them to sell something to others that has value. I.e. – they want to talk about how great they are, but they don’t want to have to do anything that anyone else would pay for in a competitive free market.

And this is only going to stop when we cut off subsidies for higher education, which is largely given to far-left administrators and far-left non-STEM professors.

News

Radical feminism changes men’s perceptions of women in the workplace

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Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted
Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted

Lately, we’ve seen an outburst of radical feminism as more women have been equating actual rape and sexual assault with sexist comments or clumsy passes. How does this change how women are perceived in the workplace?

Here’s an article from Medium (H/T Tracy) by an anonymous male feminist.

The first point is about how women handle disagreement, compared to men:

When James Damore was asked for feedback from his supervisor and internally circulated his google memo, it got leaked, he got fired and women stayed at home the next Day because “for emotional reasons”

A ten page summary of data and analysis from Damore was enough to “emotional distress” the women at the company.

This lack of resilience and self-control disrupts the workplace, and results in lost productivity. If it turns into a lawsuit, the costs are even higher. This is in addition to women having fewer STEM degrees than men, working fewer hours than men, and taking months leave for pregnancy. Not to mention affirmative action hiring and promoting in order to meet quotas of women.

Second point, is increased hostility to men.

Look at this tweet from a writer at Teen Vogue:

Emily Lindin, a mainstreatm writer with a degree in music history, tweets her hatred of men
Emily Lindin, a mainstream writer with a degree in music history, tweets her hatred of men

She has 23,000 followers on Twitter – this woman is mainstream. I looked into her background a bit. No mention of a father at home, and a self-confessed “slutty” lifestyle from her early teens onward. Her entire writing career seems to be to attack everyone who disagrees with her promiscuity.

Feminism, as an ideology, does not allow women to prefer men who exhibit traditional masculine characteristics: providing, protecting, moral and spiritual leadership, chastity, fidelity. That’s “sexist”. So what’s left? Get drunk and have sex with the hot bad boys, since evaluating a man’s character is “sexist”. Then promote false accusations and misandry to get revenge against the hot bad boys you freely chose. This will only get worse as more radical feminists waste their 20s on hot bad boys, and raise more fatherless girls when they become single mothers by choice, in their 30s.

Do men want to work with women who hate men and make false accusations with people they disagree with? I’m a conservative, Christian, pro-life virgin. I disagree with all premarital sex. If this woman worked with me and found out my views, she would almost certainly get me fired.

Another article from Medium (H/T Wes) makes a third point about how conservatives are treated by liberal women in the workplace. The article is written by a female senior software engineer, who promotes STEM to women and the elderly. She is a self-described “moderate conservative”.

Excerpt:

On September 27, 2017, I decided to attend the Atlanta Google Women Techmakers’ event “Idea Jam Session,” which was hosted at TechSquare Labs in Atlanta. At that time, I was still an active member of Women Who Code, the Atlanta GDG, and Google Women Techmakers and, perhaps naively, I just assumed that I had every right to attend the event like any other member of the group because I had not been banned.

Upon arriving at the event, Maggie immediately asked me to leave the room. At the door, she informed me that she would be extremely uncomfortable if I remained a member of the community because some of the views that I had expressed on Twitter are “very harmful to gender equality”. She then asked Daniel Sabeo, the event coordinator at TechSquare Labs, to escort me from the facility. I was deeply upset at being publicly humiliated, but left willingly without causing any disruption.

Two days later, I got an email from TechSquare Labs. Daniel had discussed the incident with Allen Nance, Paul Judge, and Rodney Sampson, the owners of the facility, and he informed me that they had collectively decided to ban me and my company from using their venue or attending any of their events because they were concerned about the “safety” of their members. I later learned from a fellow developer that Maggie had, in fact, told various people that I’d been stalking her.

[…]The following week, Martin Omander, GDG program manager for North America, formally banned me from the Google Developer Group and Google Women Techmakers and, again, declined to provide me with any details of the complaints against me or the rules that I’d allegedly violated.

How many women are likely to attack conservatives in the workplace?

Young, unmarried women voted 78% to 22% for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls.

Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election
Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election: unmarried women voters only

Obama was a radical feminist president who voted against banning infanticide multiple times as a state senator in Illinois. 78% of young, unmarried women voted for him anyway. Women who graduate from college in non-STEM fields are especially progressive. In my experience, young, unmarried women typically form their views by adapting to the dominant views of their community, which is overwhelmingly liberal on campus. In my experience, men are more likely to construct a worldview through reasoning and evaluating evidence.

I’ve personally never met a young, unmarried woman who could answer basic political questions, like naming prior terrorist attacks against the United States, US allies, or US assets abroad, or telling me the amount of the national debt. In my experience, young unmarried women are not concerned with the plight of women in Iran, Pakistan or Afghanistan. They’re not concerned with spending money today that will be paid back by generations of taxpayers not yet born.

Instead, I usually hear that they are progressive because they want taxpayer-funded abortions, taxpayer-funded contraception, no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, student-loan forgiveness, etc. They want taxpayer-funded bailouts for problems caused by their own free choices. They feel that if society is paying for something, then it’s “normal” and they don’t have feel guilty about making poor choices. Their primary concern about politics is being able to do what they feel like without anyone disapproving. Everything bad that happens is “unexpected”, and so society should have to pay for it. It wasn’t their fault that their “follow-your-heart” plan didn’t work out.

I don’t even speak to young, unmarried women about religion and politics in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if we have the same views or not. Feeling offended and going full totalitarian is just too widespread. The rational choice for men is to disengage. I can have conversations safely about religion and politics with men, even if they disagree with me.