Coming to a County Near YOU

 Coming to a County Near You

There’s been a lot of jumping and shouting lately about our second amendment rights to keep and bear arms.  We are all happy to do this even as shoot ups in public places are happening almost daily around our country.

Then there is the first amendment to our Constitution, which among other things grants us the right to freedom of speech.  Unlike having guns, there doesn't seem to be much ripple about free speech rights.

Now comes the Carroll County Board of Education which seems to have an issue with that right.  A mother, whose child was bullied in Carroll County schools, donated rainbow flags to the school system.  Rather than try to get to the root of the issue, bullying on the basis on sexual orientation- which, by the way is required by State regulation- the Board in its infinite wisdom, decided to prohibit the display of rainbow flags as political statements.  

Last year, a nationwide mental health survey found that 42% of LGBTQ youth had considered suicide in the past year.  While the pandemic has increased suicidal ideation for many teens, the Trevor Project found that this situation was clearly worsened for LGBTQ kids.  In fact, 94% of those surveyed said recent politics had worsened their outlook on their lives.  Obviously the Carroll County School Board  didn’t notice or wasn't concerned about this issue.

Three months ago, this same Board set a policy on political conversation in the classroom.  It cautioned teachers that they would be penalized if they dared to voice views in the classroom that were not “aligned with approved curriculum”.  It is not at all clear what that means since a curriculum is a scope and sequence of content without any political direction. So when or how is a teacher's voice "aligned" or not with the curriculum.  What is so scary is the thought that voicing a non-aligned view could easily be a shifting target, meaning whatever the folks in power on any given day think it is.

Florida’s Governor DeSantis has led the parade.  (Hope he wasn’t carrying a rainbow flag.) His recent “don’t say gay” bill forbids the discussion of gay relationships in schools. Maryland’s Governor Hogan has characterized the ensuing fight between Disney and DeSantis as a “crazy fight” and a violation of free speech.

That brings us back to that pesky first amendment to our Constitution.   Hopefully, some of the parties whose rights have been violated might give the Carroll County Board of Education a lawsuit to think about instead of failing to protect the safety and dignity of all of its students.

This situation could be happening in a school system near you.

When will we ever learn?

When Will We Ever Learn?

 

This past weekend major religious groups in our country celebrated the triumph people over hatred and bigotry.   These events happened thousands of years ago.  But they should be not just be celebrated once a year as historical events.  It doesn’t take much investigation to realize we are still fighting the same fights in different terms that were fought so very long ago.  Those triumphs that were celebrated were not victories because our society continues to be victimized by ignorance and bigotry.

We never want slavery to happen again.  We do not want another holocaust. Certainly, we never want to imprison innocent citizens as we did to our Japanese-Americans during WWII.  Yet crimes against Jews have tripled in New York this year over last year; they have doubled over African-American people in the same time period.  The white supremist Charlottesville demonstrators that chanted “ Jews will not replace us” and was supported by Klansmen gave a strong indication of how much more we need to do.   People were injured and killed, but our President at the time said, “there were good people on both sides”. 

The Governor of Florida is banning books that he believes are teaching Critical Race Theory even though there is no such curriculum, but he has even found evidence in math books. He probably saw the chapter on binomial equations and misunderstood what it meant.  Over and over we know that if we do not know about historical events we are condemned to repeat them.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.  In essence, NATO nations did very little.  Now they are doing much more, but because of the past response there is much more that now needs to be done.

Hatred and bigotry, unfortunately will always be with us.  Bigotry is rooted in the fear and insecurity of the bigot.  We need to teach our children our true history.  The more each of our children sees for him or herself in the torment of others, the less likely they are to participate in that torment. The very first step to getting better at anything is to define the problem.  If we deny one exists or pretend it never happened, we cannot repair the world.  We should not be fomenting racial animus for political gain. The cost to all of us is too dear.  Educators need to be able to help our children be unafraid to look at that history and answer the question, what can I do to make my future devoid of these kinds of events. This is not a job for politicians.  They need to get out of the way of professional educators. If not now, when?   If not we, who?

We need a test for that

 We Need a test for that?

 

Who are the two U. S. Senators from Maryland?  We live in a democracy and these two people just participated it the confirmation of a new Supreme Court justice.  They have very important jobs and you should at least know their names.

Currently the Maryland State Department of Education gives multiple high stakes tests to determine if students are sufficiently educated to receive a high school diploma so they can be college and career ready.  There is no test to see if they are citizenship ready to participate in a democracy even though the primary reason for funding public education is just that.

Currently there is an 8^th grade test for social studies and a 12^th grade test in government.   The 12^th grade test is rather curious.   Multiple sections involve the interpretation of graphs and political cartoons.  Students are not asked to differentiate between the roles of federal, state or community government.  They are not asked how the job of a mayor is different from that of a governor or the president.  In Maryland the state budget must be a balanced budget.  That is not true for the U.S.  No question on either point.  Nothing on the roles of the Maryland House of Delegates as opposed to the U.S. House of Representatives, truthfully there is nothing that even asks kids the names of the Maryland or federal legislative bodies.  You get to be a judge for life, the President for 4-8 years and a U.S. Senator for six years unless re-elected- none of that is on the test.  There are questions about old Supreme Court decisions and what instances would apply to them currently.  Not a word about what advise and consent means, or the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.

Oddly the 8^th grade social studies test does a better job of examining U.S. history.  It’s role is not to measure a student’s understanding of a representative democracy and it doesn’t.  

Don’t believe what I have written?  Not to worry.  Go to the MSDE website and search 12^thgrade government and 8^th grade social studies practice tests.  The 12^th grade test is an MCAP test so it is specific to Maryland.  The 8^th grade test was developed by Pearson, a test producer, so that is more generic.  See for yourself if you think we are asking the right questions to prepare our students to participate as informed citizens in a democracy.

Oh, in case you didn’t know right out of the gate, Maryland’s two U.S. senators are Benjamin Cardin and Chris Van Hollen.  We need a test for that.

You Don't Say

 You Don’t Say

There has been a great deal of jumping and shouting about protecting our second amendment rights.  That would be the right to keep and bear arms.  Strangely no one seems to be up in arms (pun intended) about our first amendment rights, chief among those is our right to free speech.   The first amendment also gives us the right to free assembly, petition the government for redress of grievances and states that the government should not establish any religion.

Increasingly, if you are in a school these rights are being taken away from you.

Let’s begin with Florida and its Don’t Say Gay bill.  If you are a teacher, you may not discuss being gay or anything approaching that unless it is developmentally appropriate and it’s never developmentally appropriate for kids under 3^rd grade.  So, when we return from spring break, if a young child has gay parents that child can’t discuss what he/she did with his/her dads or moms.  Families can report teachers who discuss these topics with children who are not developmentally ready after 3^rd grade.  The standard for what exactly IS developmentally ready is not included in the law so it is a shooting gallery for unhappy parents to take aim at teachers.

Hopefully those unhappy parents won’t move to Texas, at least not if they have trans kids.  In Texas you not only can’t talk about being trans but if your parents seek to support you with counseling or (OMG) not surgery!, your parents can be arrested for child abuse and you can be taken away from your parents and probably given to a family who will not respect or honor who you are.  But that will not be child abuse in Texas.

So far six states have banned the teaching of CRT, Critical Race Theory, and another 17 states are considering some ban.  Let’s be clear, CRT is NOT a curriculum or even a set of materials that folks could buy and teach from.  It is simply teaching the idea that racism exists and has existed and still exists and it harms us all.  Because CRT is rather amorphous these laws are VERY hard to enforce and the enforcement is left to families to complain and/or sue the school district for violating the state law.  In the old East Germany, before the wall came down, the Stasi, the East German secret service, kept tabs on everyone by making everyone an informer.  You never knew who you were safe with and who you were not. Something similar existed in this country during the McCarthy era when there were communists hiding everywhere and we all were part of the red hunt.  It’s a bit like that now.

There is a new Pixar/Disney movie called Turning Red.  The movie suggests that a girl’s menstruation is a normal biological process!!!  Well not according to some families who have petitioned Pixar/Disney to STOP producing porno movies for children.  Really, I am not making this up.

And yes, book burnings and book banning are back.  Libraries across the country are under siege to remove certain books from the library that are “unfit” to be read.  Will libraries cease to be places where we can read from a wide variety of opinions and find our own truth rather than the “truth” that has been pasteurized and deemed fit by a small group of people.

What is happening to our freedom to speak our own truth as long as we do not blasphemy others?   When did being a teacher make you a target for the shooting gallery of parents who have been given the right to oversee your teaching and report you to authorities if you do not speak their truth?

Those questions could be answered, but it might be safer to just not say.