From "a letter to the Wisconsin State Journal" about David Blaska's candidacy for the school board.
Here's a post of mine from last June showing Blaska trying to speak to the school board. I embedded video and wrote:
Blaska maintains a calm demeanor throughout the disturbing intimidation, but you can see that his hands shake... and I can only imagine how scary it must be to publicly express opinions in a small room that is packed with people denouncing you. The committee members do nothing to push back the intimidation or to protect Blaska's right to speak to the group.
Blaska called attention to the Madison teacher, Karen Vieth, who quit because of the terrible situation at one middle school. Here's my post from last week where I linked to her detailed and disturbing blog post.
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32 comments:
I have been in Blaska’s shoes. His hands aren’t shaking out of fear. His hands are shaking because there are people who need killing, and the law prevents it.
We'll see how the Detroit gambit plays out this time. I don't have much faith in a city larded with academics and government workers.
Many states, when they founded their public colleges in the mid to late 1800's, had the wisdom and foresight to locate those institutions well away from their state capitals.
I didn't see it noted, but that principal resigned or "left her position."
Ayn Rand has character Jeff Allen who was present describe John Galt speaking to the company workers in The Twentieth Century Motor Company of Starnesville, Wisconsin business firm in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.
Galt begins his strike then to stop the motor of the world.
Blaska brings him to mind. Wish him well. I may send him the book.
If you are local I will appreciate drawing his attention to this.
IRL ... Ayn Rand presented her Ethics foundation principles in speech at University of Wisconsin Madison in 60's.
Curious about impact on local academia or culture
Rand speech was originally delivered at the University of Wisconsin Symposium on “Ethics in Our Time” in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 9, 1961,
I was not yet teenage then and other side of the world.
"...David Blaska's candidacy for the school board."
When does early voting open?
It's the same in other liberal cities I've experienced.
This is why we need vouchers so parents can find school led by competent people who share their values. Charters are only a band-aid.
The principal, a POC, has never taught, except as a "visiting professor". She was transferred to a BS admin job in a bs dept at the district.
Restorative circles...gag.
What it is like to teach black students
This wasn't published (I'm not sure it could be at this point) but it was a comment found online that someone found remarkable enough to read aloud on a YouTube video.
None of this is safe to talk about. It's enough to make you despair.
The most important problem isn't what people are thinking about themselves in the suburbs - whether they are woke, whether their friends are woke. The problem is what people are doing in the downtown schools. People are urged to confront the past but they should be urged to confront the present, the mess in the schools. The black community is poor because a majority of its members do not have a high school degree due to graduation rates in the past. Now a majority graduate from high school but those in downtown schools still don't have the training a high school degree is supposed to signify. That's what matters in their lives. School reform followed by a chance to hold a good job would bring real benefits. But nothing is done about schools like Sherman and no one tells the Milwaukee black community that Foxconn is hiring and training blacks. To me, this is very wrong. What can come of it but more poverty? This is how the past reaches into the present, past all our words, and keeps that old injustice in place.
I was not yet teenage then and other side of the world.
That's no excuse for not attending.
I just read her post and the comments. MMSD obviously needs more programs and bureaucracy and money to attract better administrators and a higher credentialed superintendent.
I did so little in 7th grade after great 6th grade teachers that my parents put me in a private day school at price higher than my brother's tuition, room, and board at UNC.
Well on the positive side, MadTown Mayor Soglin and his Running Dogs on the City Council did properly desecrate and demolish —in fair part— that memorial in a municipal cemetery to the hundreds of Confederate prisoners who died of neglect, disease, and mismanagement and apparently disposed of in mass graves— in a Federal POW camp,that was such an abomination that it was closed down and relocated closer to Chicago. First things first!
"Shame Scott Walker stood by and instead of fighting for public schools, chose to run away and abandon the public school kids there. You think God told him to do that?"
I've met some of those public school students and their parents. Yeah, I'd think even God would abandon them. If there was a god, I mean.
Scott Walker never gave a dime to a religious school.
The money went to the parents who voted with their feet to leave a failing public school and it was their decision about where to go.
Sorry that those parents don't agree with your views on the wonderfulness of public schools, but I suspect they know better than you what is best for their children.
Parents are free to choose to educate their children however they like...
But not send them to private schools on the taxpayer dime.
Why not? We send taxpayer money to contractors for a variety of different state functions. What makes schools special? It's hard to imagine a voucher system that wouldn't be better for everyone except the teacher's union.
If you respond by name to the commenter I always delete, I have to take you out too.
I find it extremely humorous when a lib complains about people receiving government money to educate their kids outside the public school system. Has to be absolutely the only handout liberals don't like.
If you look carefully at big city public school systems you should notice that they mostly seem to be more jobs factories for (many) incompetents as political payoffs more than places of education.
The few caring, competent individuals are swamped. And the school boards could generally hardly be worse if the members were chosen in an effort to ruin the system, so far as the education component is concerned.
It's all about divvying up the goodies.
Then we wonder why the children don't learn.
Looks like the Assistant Principal(s) would have stepped up at her school, but perhaps bureaucratic rules prevented it.
@Althouse, I knew the rules.
Alanc709 at 8:16 is completely spot on!
Is This it?
https://www.amren.com/news/2016/08/a-white-teacher-speaks-out/
@mandrewa said
Is this it?
A White Teacher Speaks Out
Christopher Jackson, American Renaissance, July 2009
"@Althouse, I knew the rules."
I figured some of you did.
... but the target was too tempting.
The "black community" is a critical mass of social pathology, large enough that it cannot be excised and must therefore be accommodated. This means that the public schools are not going to be fixed. Instead, they are being hollowed out and preserved as yet another trophy from the Left's war on everyone.
Out here in Eugene, OR, we don't have a black community that the Leftists can use as an anvil against which to smash our institutions. So the vermin whose nature it is to take control of municipal governments are assembling a critical mass of "homeless" to serve the same function. They wash up and down I-5 with the seasons, looking for the best handout, and the Munies, together with the scum who now control most Protestant churches, compete to see who can attract the most. They call this "solving the homeless problem".
I listened to some of the reading of the rant at mandrewa's link above.
The teacher rambled so badly it did not ring true to me, but perhaps the profession has fallen since the 70's.
Is this a war zone she is describing?
How can children learn in such an environment?
Narayanan Subramanian, yes, that is the American Renaissance essay you found is the same thing, or almost the same thing, because the beginning of it is missing from the YouTube reading.
I ran into it as a YouTube video, and the anonymous person, or at least I didn't see a name, posting this YouTube video had found it as a comment on something else. So reconstructing this, Christopher Jackson wrote this for the American Renaissance in 2009. Someone copied almost all of Christopher Jackson's essay to a comment on something else. The YouTuber read the comment and made a YouTube video about it.
I saw the video awhile ago and it has stayed in my mind. Oh and I see American Renaissance has chosen to republish the essay for a second time for this year.
Ralph L. the person reading the text in the video is not the author, and this probably accounts for the sometimes awkward reading.
I believe Jackson's account. I know it's not the full truth. I know that there's a lot more out there than what Jackson's limited viewpoint gives us. I suspect, with near certainty, that Jackson has had at least some black students that did not fit the story he told.
But still from what I can detect some approximation of what Jackson describes is going on at a fairly large number of schools across the country. I don't know what the answer is but I have a hard time believing that pretending it isn't happening is going to get us to a better place.
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