Despite overwhelming strike authorization votes in two of California’s largest school districts, the trade unions announced last-minute sellout agreements to prevent the strikes.
Federal, state, and local governments made a lot of mistakes while trying to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. But the most damaging error appears to be their decision to shut down public schools and move to remote, instead of in-person, learning. Now that they are trying to clean up the mess they made, the Biden administration wants to repeat the same mistakes all over again.
Alleging “blatant anti-Semitism,” a parents group is demanding an apology after a regional chapter of the Los Angeles public school teachers union called for the United States to cease all aid to Israel.
The June 1 letter from the parents’ group, California Students United, also asks for an immediate investigation into potential civil rights violations related to racial profiling, saying union leaders have “no business singling out one country and its people, especially a people who have been victims of discrimination, persecution, and genocide for generations.”
“The position of the union you lead has thrown gasoline on the fire of what was already a volatile, unsafe, and increasingly frightening environment for Jews,” according to the letter.
March 4, 2021
Three million students appear to have gone missing since March of last year, according to a new study from the non-profit Bellwether Educational Partners. Those who vanished came primarily among the “most educationally marginalized students in the country,” an unsurprising statistic given what we know about school closures. A January study from Yale University warned that if schools were to close a full year, high school freshmen in the nation’s poorest communities would suffer “a 25 percent decrease in their post-educational earning potential.”
“By contrast, their model shows no substantial losses for students from the richest 20% of neighborhoods,” a Yale newspaper wrote.
The president of California's largest local teachers union slammed the state's schools reopening plan as "a recipe for propagating structural racism," arguing that financial incentives to school districts that reopen classrooms would only help "White and wealthier" schools.