Education

Batavia, New York I’m scribbling this on the porch as I stare at the chain-sawed remains of our massive and ancient (by American standards, which are the only standards I know) front-yard maple tree, which split in a windstorm and crushed my car. I had hoped to be a good custodian and pass along these sylvan sentinels intact to those who come after, but like America...well, I won’t go for a cheap and inexact analogy. Oh, 2020, you most annus horribilis. But I am an inveterate looker-on-the-bright-side, and among the reasons for hope in this darksome time is the potential for new, or renewed, growth on the branches of the learning tree. (If I may borrow a line from the Jackson 5.

As New York City schools grapple with how to handle a virus that has an under 1 percent infection rate in children, parenting boards frequented by the educated, monied-but-not-so-monied-as-to-send-their-kids-to-private-school set, are forming ‘pods’. A ‘pod’ will be a small group of children, usually no more than five, who will meet at each other’s homes in lieu of traditional schooling in September. You, and four other families in your same tax bracket, will hire a teacher to educate the five children in the pod. Parenting boards are overwhelmed with requests for these tutors. The families will agree to only interact with each other: an absurd and impossible promise that will surely be broken.

Americans have mixed feelings about opening schools this fall. Some — like the Trump administration’s Department of Education — want schools to reopen, withholding federal dollars from those that remain closed. However, the majority of Americans see opening schools as a health risk to their children.After two-thirds of teachers opposed the reopening of schools, the Los Angeles School District will not be returning to in-person classes this fall. However, United Teachers Los Angeles, the main teachers' union in the city, seemingly wants to suspend the return of quality instruction indefinitely. UTLA — composed of 35,000 teachers — released a list of policy demands that must be met before schools reopen.

Debate over school choice has got ugly. A public school district administrator in Kentucky recently suggested he’d delay students’ graduations if the state legislature passes school choice legislation that would give tax credits to private donors who support voucher programs for kids to attend schools of their choice. The proposed program is similar to one in Florida, and the federal government has reportedly pledged up to $70 million in support to the Bluegrass State if it passes the bill.At the heart of the outraged responses to such programs is the assumption that supporting public school students who want to attend private schools will undermine public education and hurt the kids left behind by transferring funds into private hands.

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: 'whiteness'. Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects. At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out 'a systematized campaign' for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project.

Did the Victorians execute dozens of men for sodomy? Yes, according to Naomi Wolf, who has a PhD from Oxford and a vivid imagination. Are Mizrachi Jews an ‘identity category’ of ‘Palestinians’? Yes, according to Marc Lamont Hill, possessor of an intellect so powerful that he professes at Temple University in two specious fields, Media Studies and Urban Education. The correct answers are no, and no, so see me after class. Last night, old people across Britain choked on their cocoa as Wolf plugged her book Outrages on BBC Radio. Wolf, having visited the archives of the Old Bailey, London’s chief court, claims to have discovered ‘several dozen executions’ of gay men in Victorian Britain, and has written a book about how awful the Victorians were.