VERBATIM: This, that, and, of course, Florida (again)
Just some odds and ends before you head out for the weekend.
Friends,
I hope you are on your way to having a great weekend. I’m looking forward to a little down time, but I wanted to send you some education stories before I leave.
Here it is.
Tibits
🧑🏽🎓 Uh-Oh. ChatGPT can pass a freshman year at Harvard, achieve 3.34 GPA: student. Per the experiment conducted by a Harvard student, the bot ended the year with a 3.34 GPA.
🧮 Alabama will learn how to count. The Numeracy Act, passed in 2022, aims to improve math scores. Karen Anderson, director of math improvement for the Alabama State Department of Education, said the law tries to help students understand the concepts of math and how they work, rather than just teaching them techniques.
👩🏽⚕️ When tutoring is not enough, private school parents of children with disabilities turn to $250-hour educational therapy. VERBATIM: “Ashley Shapiro is used to people being confused about what she does. As an educational therapist in Los Angeles charging $250 an hour, she bristles at being mistaken for a tutor. Her clients, primarily private-school families, turn to her when their children with learning disabilities, like dyslexia and ADHD, are falling behind.”
☠️ Maryland school chief criticized for ‘toxic’ work style. In interviews with more than 50 people, critics cited micromanagement, alienation of staff and missed agency deadlines.
😈 How after-school clubs became a new battleground in the Satanic Temple’s push to preserve the separation of church and state. Over the past few years, conflict has trailed attempts to establish After School Satan Clubs sponsored by the Satanic Temple, which the U.S. government recognizes as a religious group.
⛪ A small conservative college is changing K-12 education. Republican officials are turning to Hillsdale College in Michigan for teacher training, textbook reviews, and a curriculum that celebrates American patriotism.
🔣 I Teach High School Math: How I Lead with Equity in Mind. It's true today’s rising sophomores, the kids I’m going to teach next year, were in eighth grade when they took—and bombed—the Nation’s Report Card in math. Their scores dropped to historic lows that worried educators and parents across the country.
👨👩👧👧 What the parents' rights debate misses: the kids' right to learn to be free thinkers. Our children, just like our neighbors, may not choose to be like us in the end, but our commitment to freedom and independence requires us to ensure their rights.
👩🏾🏫 DEI College Director Fired for Not Being 'Right Kind of Black Person'. Tabia Lee, who is Black, was recently terminated from her position at De Anza Community College, located in Cupertino, California, as a full-time, tenured member after working in the education field for approximately two decades. In March of this year, Lee was informed by De Anza that she would be terminated "because of De Anza and the District's ideological opposition to Dr. Lee's humanism in the classroom," according to the complaint. It says that she "refused to knuckle under to campus orthodoxy," which Lee has described as excessively "woke."
🚸 The life skills teens should know before leaving home. Whether teens are leaving home for college, a job, to live with roommates, or to otherwise discover what’s next, Cynthia Eidelman, a family therapist and parenting coach, said parents need to give teens more freedom of choice and responsibility long before they leave home.
Video
#1 This is a pretty good video challenging the push for school choice. It contains make of the arguments that I would have poo-poohed a year ago, but make more sense to me now. On the downside, the few times it mentions charter schools, it conflates them with private schools. We have a lot of work to do to educate the public on the importance of public school choice and the need for various models within the system to serve diverse communities.
#2 It’s a good time to teach about Black Power given the news that Florida will now require students to learn that slavery taught Black people valuable skills, and that there were some African Americans who were violent when white mobs that massacred Black communities. To that end, I invited Ismael Jiminez, a Philly social studies teacher, to be this week’s guest on Freedom Friday.
Speaking of America’s original sin - racism - check out this clip from my Freedom Friday co-host, Sharif El-Mekki.
OH, FLORIDA: The Sundown state’s board of education approved new standards for teaching Black history that requires educators teach that enslaved people gained valuable skills during slavery, and that African Americans were violent towards the white mobs that came to massacre them.
Members of Ron DeSantis’ working group that developed the standards say they wanted to show that enslaved people weren’t “merely victims.”
Educators and Civil Rights groups disagree.
The NAACP responded: "Today's actions by the Florida state government are an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected. It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back. The NAACP has been fighting against malicious actors such as those within the DeSantis Administration for over a century, and we're prepared to continue that fight by any means necessary. Our children deserve nothing less than truth, justice, and the equity our ancestors shed blood, sweat, and tears for."
You can see the 216-page curriculum here.
Prior to Ron DeSantis’ education censorship regime professional media specialists and librarians had discretion to decided which materials were appropriate for students. They applied the “Miller Test,” the primary legal test for determining whether material constitutes obscenity
There are three prongs to the test:
whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value
HB 1069, Florida’s new law removed the Miller Test and the discretion of local professionals in favor of parents and community members.
Now, even Shakespeare isn’t safe.
Or, Arthur, a childhood favorite. In Clay County, Florida, a parent activist who has objected to thousands of books in the school district has filed a challenge to “Arthur’s Birthday,” a book based on the popular PBS children’s show, Popular Information reports.
One Florida superintendent is implementing a system for mediating that state’s law against certain reading materials. Rocky Hanna is superintendent of Leon County Schools, a district with 460,000 book titles in its library. He says, “My goal is to create a system where the rights of one parent and student do not impede on the rights of another parent and student who may disagree over access to materials in school. To accomplish this goal, we will be implementing a process to allow parents to determine their own student’s level of access to checking out books. This process will be available when school starts in the fall. We will have more information about this program soon.”
CURTAIN CALL: The 70-year career of Anthony Dominick Benedetto has concluded. The “jazzy crooner” and definition of cool produced 150 recordings and several decades of shows that interpreted the work of “Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Duke Ellington, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others.”
His NYT Obit says, “A lifelong liberal Democrat, Mr. Bennett participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965, and, along with Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr. and others, performed at the Stars for Freedom rally on the City of St. Jude campus on the outskirts of Montgomery on March 24, the night before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the address that came to be known as the “How Long? Not Long” speech. At the conclusion of the march, Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer from Michigan, drove Mr. Bennett to the airport; she was murdered later that day by members of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Tony Bennet, 1926-2023
That’s all folks.
Peace,
Chris
Blessings my friend. Enjoy your weekend. Great round-up as usual.