Spectator Life

As the omicron wave crests and public schools face teacher sickouts, strikes, and a rash of student absences, it is worth reviewing some basic facts about the pandemic and public education. The results of last year's experiment in remote learning have confirmed what any minimally competent teacher could have told you from the outset: instructing students online yields disastrous consequences. Indeed, the results are so bad that defenders of a maximally cautious approach can only argue about terminology (please don’t say “learning loss!”) while proposing that we shouldn’t actually measure how far students fell behind under lockdown. Meanwhile, the psychological costs of the pandemic era continue to mount.

With omicron cases rising, many school districts are returning to remote learning for the first few weeks of January. That, of course, could be extended, as we have seen happen so many times during the pandemic. As a school social worker, I can attest that remote learning has been an absolute disaster. Far from the “abundance of caution” approach, school closures have devastated our youth, with many still struggling to function. It boggles my mind that many large cities are repeating this mistake. While nearly all students suffer amid virtual schooling, our most vulnerable suffer the most. The following three hypothetical students exist in every school, as I have witnessed over the past 15 years working with New York City teenagers.

Once upon a time, at a little Indiana community college, I was on my way to becoming a high-school teacher — or so I thought. What I didn’t know was that our training was a form of brainwashing intended to enlist my fellow teachers and me for a political program. Our key text was a political operation masquerading as a trade publication: Education Week. At teaching college we were pushed to subscribe to EdWeek. Its headlines seemed tame and innocuous. For every story on Obama’s wonderful education policy, there were ten fluff pieces about blue-ribbon teachers, or profiles of decidedly overpriced new tech that could be requisitioned and tossed aside in just a few years.

Ms. Work-to-Rule, chair of the local teacher’s union, smiles icily at the bezel. The weekly Zoom conference with the district superintendent and his many assistants is not going in the direction she would like. As schools across the country prepare to resume in-person classes, Covid purists insist on strict testing, vaccine proofs and other protections. If draconian demands are not met, a few big-city locals threaten teacher strikes. Some states require masks for students and teachers regardless of vaccination status. Others prohibit districts from requiring students to wear masks at all. School board meetings might be battlegrounds. The mild but highly contagious variant, Omicron, puts everyone — administrators, teachers, parents, and students — on edge.

“Republicans can and must become the party of parents.” So said Congressman Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, in an Election Day missive as CNN and MSNBC propagandists hurled racial vitriol at Virginia voters. Banks is right. But the Republican Party already is the de facto party of parents. Democrats, through the machinations of their radical-woke apparatchiks, have made themselves the Anti-Parent Party. GOP lawmakers are welcome, albeit late to the fight. The RSC’s dispatch recalls Joseph Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan after America A-bombed Hiroshima. Alas, there is no mistaking the Red Army pincer movement in Manchuria with the RSC’s memo, which observed, “There is real energy from parents that we need to understand.

Americans are beginning to seek alternatives to our established menu of colleges and universities. In fact, not just Americans. Students from other countries are also choosing alternatives to studying in the US. The combined effect has been a sharp drop in American college enrollment, which is down overall by about 8 percent over the last two years, and more than 14 percent at community colleges. International student enrollment is down a total of 15 percent, but that masks an even more serious problem: enrollment of new foreign students fell last year by 46 percent. Some of this, of course, is due to Covid. And some of it is due to a demographic shift: fewer babies born 17 to 20 years ago means fewer young people to fill the seats in lecture halls.

“Phony, trumped-up culture wars.” That’s how Barack Obama described Glenn Youngkin's platform to a rally in Richmond, in the run-up to the Virginia gubernatorial election in which the GOP candidate defeated Terry McAuliffe. Obama didn’t stop there. In the former president’s estimation, Youngkin either “believes in the same conspiracy theories that resulted in a mob” or he is a cynical hack who would “say or do anything to get elected.” After Youngkin prevailed in the November 2, election, and other Republicans swept into the offices of attorney general and lieutenant governor, the reality of the “culture war” themes became abundantly clear to most observers.

Most Americans want schools to promote knowledge and champion principles of human decency. They want schools to be safe. They do not want children race-shamed, or exposed to the anomic and depraved. A fourteen-year-old boy wandering around campus — any campus — wearing a floor-length dress doesn’t sound wholesome to them. What’s going on in “our” schools, some ask, and not in a sunny way. Too many know from experience, at least in metro and blue-liberal districts, that any parent who avows the Ten Commandments or praises the Boy Scout Law might get the fish-eye from the principal. If dad objects to critical race theory or transgender bathrooms, heads explode. A frosty diversity lecture might not suffice. Should we call security or 911?

If you haven’t seen the pictures of a Kentucky high school’s racy homecoming festivities yet, you might want to just close this tab and go about your day. Still here? All right, but I warned you. The pictures are SFW in the sense that you won’t get fired or anything, but you’ll definitely get some weird looks, so make sure your boss isn’t walking by. Coast clear? OK, here’s the link.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe, nosediving in the polls against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin, is making his final appeal to voters using divisive racial politics. The race for Virginia governor has focused intensely on education, as Youngkin has leaned in to the concerns of parents protesting local school boards, while McAuliffe's campaign has comparatively dismissed the issues raised as conspiracy theories or racist. McAuliffe attempted to address education policy during a speech on Sunday, but opted to do so among racial lines. The former governor accused his opponent of campaigning on a "racial dog whistle," then un-ironically went on to complain that there are too many white teachers in Virginia.

Attend a Loudoun County school board meeting in Virginia, and you will find it almost as locked down as the US Capitol post-January 6. Police cars line the streets and dozens of security personnel post up inside the building. I attended the most recent meeting on Tuesday as media and was subject to a thorough bag check and extensive metal scanning. Residents who wish to speak at meetings are not even allowed in the building until they are in the next group of ten scheduled to appear, and they are not allowed to bring in bags or purses. Chairs for the public are socially distanced, limiting the number of people who can even sit inside.

Given the recent spate of “fuck Joe Biden” chants at college football games, you’d be forgiven for thinking that a year cooped up out of the classrooms might have had a transformative effect on America’s undergraduates. Perhaps the kids finally realized that wokeness isn’t the answer? Alas, two recent case studies of campus craziness have arrived to bring Cockburn crashing down to reality. The first comes courtesy of Oberlin College, a liberal arts school infamous for its overblown “sushi-is-cultural-appropriation” scandal in 2015, paying millions in damages after its students libeled a local bakery and for inflicting Lena Dunham on the world.

When future historians congregate to conduct their postmortem of the short-lived Biden administration, what date will they pick to mark the crisis that signaled the beginning of the end? I’d like to offer October 4, 2021 for consideration. In the weeks before, it is true, Biden’s approval rating had been in free fall. (Fun pastime if you’re bored: enter ‘Biden’ and ‘free fall’ into your favorite search engine). There was the world historical disaster of our evacuation of Afghanistan, the nearest parallel to which was not America’s ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 but William Elphinstone’s disastrous evacuation from Kabul in 1842. There was the unfolding crisis at our southern border.

Are you ready to 'challenge man box culture?' asks the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh’s Women’s Center. Or maybe that special man in your life suffers from 'privilege' and needs rehab through Brown University’s Masculinity Peer Education program. But what about young men looking for meaningful, non-confrontational connections on campus? That scene is awfully dry. While groups like Women in STEM and Women in Business boost female students’ confidence by treating them as capable and competent professionals, college-aged men are often left with little to give their lives direction. Don’t expect these trends to change anytime soon either. According to the Wall Street Journal, women now make up nearly 60 percent of the college population, an all-time high.

Have you ever wondered what American schools teach about 9/11? Here is a partial answer. I’ve reviewed five of the most popular American history textbooks for high school.

Jen Tafuto, an elementary school teacher in Manchester, Connecticut, posted a two-minute video on Twitter in which she announced her resignation from her position. She explained, ‘After six years as a teacher in Connecticut, I decided to resign from what I thought would be my forever career because I felt more like a political activist than a teacher in my own classroom.’ Her announcement, originally posted by 1776ActionOrg on August 30, quickly drew a lot of attention in the media. Fox News, RealClearPolitics, USA Today, the Daily Caller, a local Hartford station and a great cloud of bloggers too.

Georgetown University announced Tuesday that it is canceling its fall homecoming festivities 'out of an abundance of caution' due to the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19. To my alma mater I say: trust the science — give us back our homecoming. A college campus, particularly Georgetown, is one of the safest places in the country to be if you are worried about the pandemic. Students, faculty and staff were required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine before they were allowed to step on campus this fall. The data tells us that the vast majority of hospitalizations and nearly every death from the coronavirus is among the unvaccinated.

The Biden administration fired a stern warning to five states on  Monday afternoon, warning them that forcing all students to wear masks every day might violate the students’ civil rights. Just kidding! That’s what would happen in a country with health policies that weren’t stupid. In America, we have Anthony Fauci. Too bad. No, the Biden administration’s letter to state officials in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah is health policy as a bureaucratic Matruschka doll: the administration seeks to ban states from banning school districts from banning unmasked faces. Now, masking schoolchildren may or may not be good health policy (it’s not, but indulge Cockburn in the hypothetical for a moment). But isn’t it just that, a health policy?

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one. There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.