Tag Archives: Teacher

News

Democrats propose 23 billion bailout for teacher unions

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Story here from the leftist Washington Post. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)

Excerpt:

As public schools nationwide face larger class sizes and cuts in programs, the Senate’s leading Democrat on education issues proposed a $23 billion bailout Wednesday to help avert layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and other school personnel in the coming academic year.

[…]Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that school layoffs could total from 100,000 to 300,000 unless Congress acts.

“It is brutal out there, really scary,” Duncan told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is a real emergency. What we’re trying to avert is an education catastrophe.”

Duncan stopped just short of endorsing Harkin’s bill. But he said efforts to improve schools will suffer if class sizes rise, summer school is cut and other programs are jettisoned.

Harkin, chairman of the Appropriations Committee’s panel on education and of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said time is running out because states are starting to issue layoff notices. “We must act soon,” he said. “This is not something we can fix in August. We have to fix it now.”

[…]Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said he worried about where the government would find $23 billion for a bailout in a time of growing federal budget deficits. “I wonder from whose schoolchildren we are going to borrow this money, because we have a looming debt crisis in this country and we’ll need to debate this,” he said. “We all want to help our children and our schools, but that is a deep concern.”

A fitting follow-up to today’s earlier education policy post. This is why you don’t put silver spoon liberals in charge of the country – they just keep spending and spending to bail out their greedy special interest groups.

News

UK introduces hate registry for tracking students aged 5 years and up

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Story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Heads will be forced to list children as young as five on school ‘hate registers’ over everyday playground insults.

Even minor incidents must be recorded as examples of serious bullying and details kept on a database until the pupil leaves secondary school.

Teachers are to be told that even if a primary school child uses homophobic or racist words without knowing their meaning, simply teaching them such words are hurtful and inappropriate is not enough.

Instead the incident has to be recorded and his or her behaviour monitored for future signs of ‘hate’ bullying.

The accusations will also be recorded in databases held by councils and made available to Whitehall and ministers to help them devise future anti-bullying campaigns.

[…]Many schools nationwide have already followed advice that they should record incidents of alleged racist, homophobic or anti-disability bullying.

One report last year by the Manifesto Club civil liberties think-tank said that 40,000 children each year are having racist charges added to their school records.

But ministers aim to make reporting of supposed ‘hate taunting’ a legal requirement for every school, primary as well as secondary, and every local authority across the country from the beginning of the new school year in September.

Incidents considered serious will have to be reported to local authorities. Children’s Secretary Ed Balls is set to introduce rules that, officials said, ‘will mean that schools will have to record and report serious or recurring incidents of bullying to their local authority.

I don’t think that it’s the government’s job to monitor and regulate playground interactions.

News

State legislatures aim to pass bills to guarantee academic freedom

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Story here from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

The recent front page New York Times article on academic freedom legislation offers a stark reminder that the intelligentsia is very worried about the prospect of teachers gaining academic freedom, as a bill presently in the Kentucky legislature would allow, “to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, including but not limited to the study of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

From 2008-2009, 12 academic freedom bills were submitted into state legislatures, including Florida, Alabama (2), South Carolina (2), Missouri (2), Michigan, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Iowa, and New Mexico. Now in 2010, there are 3 bills already, including bills in Kentucky, Missouri, and Mississippi.

Here are a couple of examples:

The Kentucky bill encourages teachers to “promote critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories being studied.”

The Missouri bill allows teachers “to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of the theory of biological and hypotheses of chemical evolution.”

Details on the language used in each bill is provided in the post.