More fog

The first day of February came up foggy, so I relished another chance to take pictures in weather that’s not so common here (though the previous time had been not that long before, on December 14th). I headed for the pond along Kulmbacher Drive in far north Austin, which proved a worthwhile place for the kinds of misty photographs I imagined. The top view shows winter cattails (Typha sp.). Below, the reflections of so many bare stalks intrigued me.

 

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 Education in the news

 

In my October 23rd commentary last year I reported that the public schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts, were segregating students in “affinity groups,” which is to say illegally according to race or ethnicity. Several families fought back against the illegal segregation through a lawsuit brought by Parents Defending Education and have now largely prevailed against the Wellesley school district.

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At the John F. Kennedy Middle School in Enfield, Connecticut, students were recently given a worksheet that told them to use pizza toppings as metaphors for sex. Honest—I’m not clever enough to have made that up. Examples included “cheese = kissing” and “olives = giving oral.” You can read the details in a New York Post article.

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On February 10, Wisconsin state lawmaker Lee Snodgrass tweeted that “If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education, they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.” In other words, even though parents’ taxes pay for the public education system, parents aren’t entitled to a say in how their children are educated in the public schools. You can read more about this in a local television station’s news report.

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The American Bar Association, which accredits law schools, is “poised to mandate race-focused study as a prerequisite to graduating from law school.”

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“Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their ‘cultural competency,’ another code for ‘wokeness.‘ Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.” You can find out more in a Federalist article.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman