A Metro Vancouver education assistant has been ordered to “immediately cease” all online activity and remove all content from Instagram, TikTok and the adult subscription service OnlyFans.
School District 43 sent the warning to Maple Ridge resident Kristin MacDonald in a letter, stating that if she didn’t comply, she could face disciplinary measures “including termination.”
School District 43 is big on the transgender thing of course.
Wherever you look, the demand for more choice and the evidence of its benefits are abundant.
The school-choice boom that began in the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic has carried on in 2023, with states across the country implementing or expanding programs that give families better access to private educational alternatives. In Canada, unfortunately, the story is quite different; there’s been no such progress for school choice.
The Ontario government’s new bill to give the province more control over school boards, in order to get back to focusing on reading, writing and arithmetic, is welcome news for parents who are concerned that schools are increasingly focused on indoctrination rather than education. The fact that the left-wing media and those involved in the education system are so perplexed about why reform is necessary highlights how out of touch they really are.
Taking over the boards is a good start but unless they are prepared to shut down the insane teacher’s colleges like OISE and bust the union there is no hope for public education.
IQ scores are nosediving after a long increase
New research from the United States confirms a worrying trend — a long-term decline in IQ scores. In cruder terms, Americans are getting dumber every year.
According to a report in Popular Mechanics, researchers from Northwestern University used “survey responses from 394,378 Americans between 2006 to 2018 to examine if cognitive ability scores changed within the US in those 13 years”. What they found was a general, though not uniform, drop-off in measured ability.
B.C. Teachers’ Federation leaders are showing scant interest in responding to the way the proportion of male teachers has declined to one in four.
Last month, delegates to the BCTF convention rejected a motion to “take steps to redress the increase in gender disparity in the teaching profession, such as engaging members through a task force.”
The BCTF is not alone in showing little concern for the fall in male teachers. That’s despite a band of North American advocates maintaining male teachers could provide positive role models for boys, who are doing increasingly poorly in kindergarten to Grade 12. Young men, in addition, now account for less than 40 per cent of those in higher education.
A worthwhile initiative as they say but one doomed to fail.
The only type of male likely to be granted a spot in a teacher’s college today is probably a drag queen.
Two plus two no longer equals four, according to members of the Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association (OMCA), who consider the equation to be a white-supremacist dog whistle instead of a basic mathematical truth.
According to a webinar created by OMCA president Jason To, proponents of math’s political neutrality who use the phrasing “2 + 2 = 4” are engaged in an act of “Covert White Supremacy.”
Has the Ford government done anything to counter this lunacy?
After decades of growth, college enrollments have been falling over the past ten years. A recent AP story says that young Americans are “jaded with education” and are therefore “skipping college.”
For 17 years, I’ve been arguing that higher education is oversold in the U.S. — that because of government subsidies, far more people have been enrolling than otherwise would. Many academically disengaged individuals end up in college more for fun than for any desire for learning. If they graduate, they often wind up in jobs that they could have done while still in high school.
Parents nationwide are still battling the impact of stringent school closures and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Chicago families are no exception.
An alarming report has revealed that dozens of Chicago schools claim no students are proficient in either math or reading despite the state and federal government funneling billions of dollars into education in the Windy City.
h/t MP
In March, 2021, a student at the University of Toronto found a tutor online and hired him to surreptitiously write an exam on his behalf.
In return for a $60 fee, the tutor used the student’s ID and password and joined the exam, which was being conducted online. The 90-minute test was worth 20 per cent of the grade in a first-year accounting class. The student didn’t want his stand-in just to squeeze by, though. He wanted an A. “I need at least 80+ to achieve my goal, so please make sure you have the ability to do that,” the student wrote.
Last fall, many candidates for trustee in municipal races across Canada—mostly in Ontario and British Columbia—ran on what was broadly described as anti-woke platforms.
They warned against the politicization of the school system and an erosion of standards that pushed kids more towards an activist mindset than to developing the well-rounded skills they need to succeed in life.
Remember, in those long ago innocent years before wokeism, and environmentalism, and social justice-ism captured the school boards and entered the classroom, when teachers taught subjects?
You know reading, writing, arithmetic. I do. I remember when for the earliest grade there were alphabet cards.
The Left likes to complain about a so-called “school to prison pipeline,” where school disciplinary policies drive at-risk kids into a life of crime.
Every Leftist organization under the sun has been attacking the issue, pushing for more lax discipline in the schools to “decriminalize” kids.
The ADL of all people–which at one time was not a ridiculous organization–describes the pipeline thusly …
Locally … Union calling on Ontario to hire support staff to address school violence
“The student voice was all that mattered, and basically they silenced the teachers’ voice,” said one former teacher.
An alarming email went out to staff at Pinecrest Public School last June with the subject line: “Students reporting they don’t feel safe!”
The sender was Michael Sternberg, a grade 5 and 6 teacher at Pinecrest. He explained how multiple students that very day told him they felt unsafe at the school. “I am not making this up!” he wrote. “Please help! Someone!”
Homeschool.
Several months after receiving my second bachelor’s degree, I found myself working behind an espresso machine once again. When I graduated from high school in 2004, postsecondary education was presented as the ticket to high salaries and trappings of middle-class life such as home ownership.
Instead, my generation graduated from university into a global recession, followed by rising home and living costs and the global COVID-19 pandemic. The conventional wisdom was thrown on its head. Today, with the exception of certain professions, higher education guarantees little to workers.
A report from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection says 252 current or former school personnel committed or were accused of committing offences of a sexual nature against 548 children over a five-year span.
It says another 38 personnel were criminally charged for child pornography-related offences during the same time frame of 2017 to 2021.
“It is startling and a bit infuriating,” said Noni Classen, director of education at the Winnipeg-based centre.
