Calgary boy disciplined by school for protecting classmate from knife attack

The UK Daily Mail reports.

Excerpt:

A schoolboy who bravely tackled a knife-wielding pupil who was threatening a classmate was punished because such heroic actions are strictly banned.

Briar MacLean, 13, stepped in after he spotted an argument was quickly beginning to escalate between two boys at Sir John A. Macdonald school in Alberta, Canada.

Suddenly one of the boys pulled out a knife and began to threaten the other turning an scuffle into a potentially deadly situation.

The heroic teenager charged and tackled the knife-brandishing youngster into a wall sending both attacker and knife falling to the floor.

But for his bravery the pupil received not a commendation but a stern telling off from staff for ignoring school rules.

According to the Calgary Board of Education, Briar should have left the scene to find a teacher – abandoning the unarmed student.

Instead instincts kicked in and he chose to act – meaning there were no cuts, no stab wounds, and no need to call an ambulance.

Briar said: ‘He pulled out his flip knife so I came in and pushed him into the wall.

‘It was just to help the other kid so he wouldn’t get hurt.’

Briar’s reward for his bravery was a day in the school office, removed from the other students, and a stern lecture about not playing the hero.

Here in the United States, we had a similar event.

Excerpt:

A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer.

The child was questioned for more than two hours before his mother was called, she said, adding that he uncharacteristically wet his pants during the episode. The boy is 5 — “all bugs and frogs and cowboys,” his mother said.

[...]If the punishment stands, it would become part of the boy’s permanent school record and keep him out of classes the rest of the school year, the family said. He would miss his end-of-year kindergarten program at Dowell Elementary School in Lusby.

[...]The case comes at a time of heightened sensitivity about guns in schools across the country. Locally, children in first and second grade have been disciplined for pointing their fingers like guns and for chewing a Pop-Tart-like pastry into the shape of a gun. In Pennsylvania, a 5-year-old was suspended for talking about shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun that blows soap bubbles.

I definitely don’t recommend sending children to public schools – especially.

Filed under: News, Alberta, Anti-Male, Appeasement, Briar MacLean, Calgary, Compassion, Cowardice, Education, Educrat, Feminism, Feminized, Misandry, Nanny State, Pacficism, Public School, School, Teacher, War Against Boys, Weakness

New study: private religious schools outperform public schools and public charter schools

Reported by The Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

I recently conducted a meta-analysis of more than ninety studies on education, and the results suggest that perhaps it is time for America’s leadership and the general public to take a second look at religious private schools. At the risk of immodesty, let me be frank. The study is hugely important because it is the first published meta-analysis to compare the three primary types of American schools: religious private schools, traditional public schools, and charter schools.

A meta-analysis statistically combines all the relevant existing studies on a given subject in order to determine the aggregated results of the research. This meta-analysis yielded results that surprised many by indicating that students from public charter schools did no better than their peers in traditional public schools. In contrast, youth from religious private schools performed better academically than their counterparts in both public charter schools and traditional public schools, even when the results were adjusted to account for socioeconomic status, selectivity, race, and various other factors.

[...]Examining results from all ninety studies, I found that the average academic outcome for religious school students was .28 of a standard deviation unit higher than for traditional public school (TPS) students, while the average for charter school students was only .01 of a standard deviation unit higher. If one converts these numbers to percentiles, the average academic outcome was 11 percentage points higher than that of TPS pupils, while charter school attendees scored about the same as their TPS counterparts.

Translated into more tangible numbers, students who attend private religious schools attain educational levels that average about twelve months ahead of those attending regular public schools. Even when the meta-analysis employed sophisticated controls, which included measures for socioeconomic status, selectivity, gender, and race, youth who attended faith-based schools achieved at levels seven months ahead of both TPS and public charter school students.

One of the most intriguing results of the study is that the racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps are roughly 25 percent narrower in religious private schools than in public schools. This finding is particularly interesting when one considers that over the years the government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to bridge the gaps, with only limited success. Higher expectations for students, and school leaders’ insistence that pupils take demanding courses, could help to explain these circumstances in faith-based schools.

The meta-analysis focused primarily on scholastic performance, but it also examined student behavior. The results indicated that youth from faith-based schools maintained even a larger edge in behavior than they did in school academics. That is, pupils from religious private schools exhibited fewer behavioral problems, even when socioeconomic status, selectivity, race, and gender were also controlled for. This translates into fewer gangs, lower levels of drug abuse, and greater racial harmony than one typically finds in public schools.

Many people, even this researcher, expected public charter school students to perform somewhere in between the levels achieved by students attending faith-based schools and those attending traditional public schools, given that they were trying to mimic certain aspects of private religious schools.

To the extent that neither traditional public schools nor charter schools are succeeding on a broad scale, it appears that the best hope for American education is religious private schools. Not only are they considerably more economically efficient, but their students also achieve better academic and behavioral results.

I think that it is noteworthy that Democrats opposes allowing parents – especially poor parents – to have a choice of what school their children will attend. The Obama administration even de-funded a voucher program that served poor-minority students. Teacher unions are one of the strongest pro-Democrat special interests. If the Democrat Party has to choose between poor, minority students and their powerful allies in the teach unions, the choice is not a hard one. They choose the teacher unions.

Filed under: News, Benefit, Big Labor, Charter School, Choice, Cost, Education, Labor, Minority, Parent, Parochial School, Performance, Poor, Poverty, Private School, Public Charter School, Public School, Religious School, Research, School Choice, Student, Study, Teacher, Teacher Union, Voucher

Is public school a viable option for Christian parents?

A couple of quick anecdotes from Yahoo News first, then we’ll see the numbers.

Excerpt:

Take the case of Petrona Smith. She says in a lawsuit that she was fired from teaching at Bronx PS 211 in March 2012 after a seventh-grader reported that she’d used the “N” word, according to The New York Post.

‘Negro.’

Smith doesn’t deny using the word. But she argues that everyone uses it, when speaking Spanish. She was teaching the Spanish words for different colors, and the color “black” in Spanish is “negro.” She also taught the junior high school students, in this bilingual school, that the Spanish term for black people is “moreno.” And by the way, Smith, who is from the West Indies, is black.

And more:

The Akron Public Schools Board of Education voted in January to pursue the firing of Melissa Cairns. She was a math teacher at Buchtel Community Learning Center.

The school district said that Ms. Cairns posted a photo on her personal Facebook page which showed 8 or 9 out of her 16 students with duct tape across their mouths. The caption read: “Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!” The district says a colleague of Cairns’ notified a supervisor of the photo.

[...]This past week, Cairns was officially fired because “She showed a lack of good judgment. Her conduct was unbecoming of a teacher,” Akron Public Schools spokesman Mark Williamson told Newsnet5.

He went on to explain it wasn’t the use of the duct tape, but the posting of the photo of children on Facebook that showed poor judgement.

As you know, you can’t fire public school teachers for incompetence or sexual abuse of children.

Excerpt:

He worked just one year as a full-time teacher in New York. But he has collected nearly $1 million for 13 years for doing almost nothing.

Aryeh Eller, 46, a former music teacher at Hillcrest HS in Queens, is the longest-sitting “rubber room” teacher in the city. He was yanked from the classroom in 1999 and confessed to repeated sexual harassment of female students, according to a 2000 investigative report.

[...]Since his 1999 suspension, he has collected $943,000, plus health and pension benefits — and the total will hit $1 million this year.

Now let’s see if this focus on political correctness instead of results is working for taxpayers and students.

The Wall Street Journal:

Over the last four decades, public education spending has increased rapidly in the United States. According to the Department of Education, public schools spent, on average, $12,922 per pupil in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than double the $6,402 per student that public schools spent in 1975.

Despite that doubling of funds, just about every measure of educational outcomes has remained stagnant since 1975, though some have finally begun to inch upward over the last few years. Student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the only consistently observed measure of student math and reading achievement over the period—have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970s. High school graduation rates haven’t budged much over the last 40 years, either.

You can find more data to flesh out those claims linked at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

To remove any doubt, just take a look at the libertarian Cato Institute’s graph on public school spending vs scholastic achievement. We are are wasting money indoctrinating kids in political correctness. The extra money that we are spending on education isn’t going into making students smarter or more productive.

Filed under: Polemics, Achievement, Democrat Party, Education, Graduation, Graduation Rate, High School, Indoctrination, Math, Per Pupil Spending, Performance, Political Correctness, Prison, Public School, Reading, Rubber Room, Scholastic Achievement, Student, Teacher, Teacher Union, Union

Atheist Inquisition led by Jerry Coyne seeks to censor pro-ID physicist at Ball State University

Evolution News reports.

Excerpt:

There is a very disturbing affair going on at Ball State University that everyone needs to know about. The public university in Muncie, Indiana, has been under pressure from a rabid national atheist group and from atheist activist Jerry Coyne to discipline an assistant physics professor for teaching about intelligent design. Coyne and the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) claim it’s a legal, constitutional matter, no less: teaching about ID violates the First Amendment! “It’s religion taught as science in a public university, and it’s not only wrong but illegal,” writes Coyne. “This will now go to the lawyers.”

Ball State has announced it will indeed scrutinize the situation. FFRF staff attorney Andrew L. Seidel complained in a legally vacuous letter to Ball State president Jo Ann Gora. Amazingly, the university responded with this ominous public statement:

The university received a complaint from a third party late yesterday afternoon about content in a specific course offered at Ball State. We take academic rigor and academic integrity very seriously. Having just received these concerns, it is impossible to comment on them at this point. We will explore in depth the issues and concerns raised and take the appropriate actions through our established processes and procedures.

Being the subject of such controversy, with your employer issuing public statements about how higher ups will be “explor[ing] concerns” about your “academic rigor” and “integrity,” is obviously the last thing an academic in Eric Hedin’s shoes wants. It’s enough to make the blood drain from your face.

Click here to sign the petition to defend academic freedom at Ball State University.

Filed under: News, Academic Freedom, Atheism, Ball State University, Church of Darwin, Classroom, Darwinism, Design, Dogma, Economy, Education, Evolution, Fascism, FFRF, Freedom From Religion Foundation, Galileo, Global Warming, Industry, Intelligent Design, Jerry Coyne, Larry Moran, Leftism, Naturalism, Persecution, Religion, Science, Secularism, Spanish Inquistition, Student, Teach the Controversy, Teacher

Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about parents and schools

This is a must-listen, especially for any single Christian woman who would like to get married and have children. If you want to marry a Christian man, you should listen to this lecture and also the Dr. Morse lecture on marriage Every Day. Christian men expect Christian women to know a lot about marriage. About why children need mothers, and why they need fathers, and how the state is always taxing families and then using that money to poke their noses in and teach the children all kinds of bad things.

With that introduction, here is the MP3 file on education policy.

Note: public schools = government-run schools.

Topics:

• Does God care whether we people marry and have children?
• Does God care whether Christian parents raise their children to know him?
• Should government promote bearing children?
• What are some effects of declining birth rates in other countries?
• What are the economic effects of declining birth rates?
• Who has the right to decide how children are trained: government or parents?
• What does the Bible say about parents having to raise children to know him?
• Does the government have the responsibility for training children?
• What do educational bureaucrats think of parents training children?
• What do school boards think of parents training children?
• Should school boards be elected by local, state or federal government?
• Should Christians be opposed to government-run education? (public schools)
• How should schools be viewed by parents? As a replacement or as a helper?
• How are schools viewed by those on the left and in communist countries?
• How can you measure how supporting a government is of parental rights?
• How is parental authority viewed in left-wing EU countries like Germany?
• How is parental authority respected in the United States?
• Should parents have a choice of where their children go to school?
• What is a voucher program? How is it related to parental autonomy?
• How does competition (school choice) in education serve parental needs?
• Why do public school teachers, unions and educrats oppose competitition?
• How well do public schools do in educating children to achieve?
• Does the government-run monopoly of public schools produce results?
• Does paying more and more money to public schools make them perform?
• How do teacher unions feel about having to compete in a voucher system?
• Does the public school monopoly penalize the poorest students?
• Does the public school monopoly penalize children of certain races?
• Does the public school monopoly cause racial predujice?
• What else should parents demand on education policy?
• Is it good for parents when schools refuse to fire underperforming teachers?

This podcast is just amazing! This is what we need to be teaching in church. Church should be the place where you go to learn and reflect about how to tailor your life plan based on what the Bible says. And I think that this whole notion of free market – of choice and competition benefiting the consumer (parents) – applies to everything that government does, especially education and health care.

Related posts

• Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about parents and schools
• Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about self-defense
• Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about capital punishment
• Christian professor of economics discusses capitalism, socialism and the Bible
• How I got interested in the relationship between Christianity and economics
• First Things reviews Jay Richards’ Money, Greed and God
• Ron Nash explains what should Christians believe about social justice

Filed under: Podcasts, AFT, Barack Obama, Charter School, Choice, Competition, Conservatism, Education, Education Policy, Education Reform, Europe, Government, Government Control, National Education Association, NEA, Policy, Politics, Private School, Public Education, Public School, Race, Race to the Top, Racism, Regulation, Teacher, Teacher Union, Voucher