MNPS can do better

Pro-tip: Don't EVER let your kids order from @SHEIN_Official The WORST customer service. Seems cheap, but you end up losing 💵 bc your order "disappears" from the account, so no returns. Fast fashion at its worst! Don't be tempted! Not worth it!! #shein #scam

.@apoorva_nyc blocked replies so I have to quote tweet. Covid did not close the nation's schools. Politicians, mayors, and school board members closed them. In Europe and some of the U.S., different choices were made, despite old buildings. ajlamesa.medium.com/most-european-…

The implicit assumption that school closure decisions reflected some vaguely rational attempt at cost-beneift analysis, as opposed to a trolley problem governed by moral and political sentiment, seems extremely wrong.

@TheEliKlein @KatePri14608408 So weird

@MrDanielBuck 🎯

There’s this inexplicable reflex to ask schools to be seemingly everything EXCEPT actual schools where academic learning happens

New meta-analysis finds that when teachers lead mindfulness activities in the classroom they have absolutely ZERO effect (likely a trade off for time not spent on academics) Can we PLEASE stop deputizing teachers into mental health roles in which they have no training?

@FutureEdGU @dvmmum Every story an ed reporter produces about a red-state outrage is a story not produced about literacy, recovery, or participation. There aren't that many ed reporters!

I’ve seen enough of this debate to reaffirm why @AliceRolli1 can be the education mayor. Freddie focused answers on facilities, partnerships, and more $. Alice focused on results for kids, choices for parents and stronger teaching and learning. @LetNashville #SchoolChoice

@norinrad10 @MetroSchools does a terrible job with advanced and behind students (ask me how I know)

amen

Former mayoral candidate, @stephformayor, shares her thoughts on the mayoral runoff as a local Nashvillian, endorses @AliceRolli1, and encourages you to look closely at each candidate before voting in this fearlessly honest op-ed. Worth a read and a share.

👏 Freddie 👏 O'Connell 👏 is 👏 the 👏 status 👏 quo 👏 candidate 👏

The entire time sentiment concerning the direction of the city has been sinking, @freddieoconnell has served on the Metro Council. At last week's forum, he claimed, "We've got a shelf full of good plans." O'Connell *is* the status quo that got us here in the first place.

Opportunity Nashville & Nashville Public Television (NPT) are hosting the only live @MetroNashville mayoral education-focused debate between candidates @freddieoconnell @AliceRolli1. Thursday, Aug 17 at 7pm CT. #NashEdDebate wnpt.org/tune-in/ @SCORE4Schools @ScarlettFndt

@LeightonLiles @nkornutick 👀

This may be the wrong side of the river, but they sure can throw a party.

Nashville school board vice-chair Rachael Anne Elrod tells parents "schools are open, buildings are not" in defense of subjecting their children to 10+ months of disastrous "virtual learning" programs which widened education gaps per state testing data. Am I doing this right?

@motherindie Yep— The assumption that parents don’t WANT (& try REALLY hard) to utilize their neighborhood public schools is too prevalent Many of my neighbors choose private (esp after elem). If not that, then charter/magnet. Nobody “wants” to. But all understand the necessity for most kids

@LetNashville My eyes aren’t great. Took me a minute, but yes—bike people, bus people and train people 😂 So diverse! Wish there was education people. Too much to ask for??

All the diversity of a Freddie event - 🚴 people, 🚌 people, and 🚆 people all coming together in unity!

@LetNashville 👀

@Elex_Michaelson @TonyThurmond twitter.com/JenniferSey/st…

With 20/20 hindsight, did California keep schools closed too long during the pandemic? State Superintendent @TonyThurmond: "It's hard to say. 1 million people died from COVID. And I think California took the right measures to keep everyone safe." youtube.com/watch?v=POYhba…

@RuthJoy96960173 Looking forward to the podcast!

A funny thing happened to me on my way back to teaching at Kent State this fall. I got hit with a syllabus. Or, more accurately, I got hit with the requirement to add things to my course that I could not in good conscience agree to. A week or so ago, I said on Twitter/X that the university - where I’d taught for more than a dozen years - had asked me to come back this fall semester and teach the course that had been my specialty for most of the time I’d been there. The course is Education in a Democratic Society. It’s what’s known as a foundational course, drawing from many different disciplines. I structure the course to include the history and philosophy of education, some sociology, some legal issues, and even how to read and evaluate academic publications. Besides that, we discuss current events and issues that might come up in the news or opinion and professional journals on any given day during the semester. I enthusiastically accepted. I love to teach future teachers and the course is a requirement for all education majors. For most of the students, it is their first education course. And, I like to think, an important one. I began, as I always do before a semester starts, to refine and update my course syllabus. That’s when I found out that a lot had changed at my university since I’d last taught a year-and-a-half ago. It was the usual Woke stuff: “To nurture diversity, equity and inclusion within our college, we practice cultural sensitivity and responsiveness to empower diverse groups of people, and to dismantle systemic injustices and remove oppressive barriers and ceilings.” “[We are] committed to working collectively to dismantle systemic injustice so that Black, Indigenous, Asian American, Hispanic and all People of Color feel that they belong, are welcome and that they can fully participate in our university community. Challenging these structural forms of oppression requires a dismantlement of the racist and racialized structures that sustain them.” “[We] will continue to work towards opposing all forms of racial discrimination, harassment, intimidation, hatred, belittling, stereotypes, condescension, microaggressions and recognize their legacies which ostracize groups based on race and skin color. We understand that these forms of domination have historically existed within structural and systemic oppressions supported by classism, sexism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other markers.” ” We call on you as a student within the College …to embrace diversity in how you approach your learning experiences and how you contribute as an important participant in our learning communities. This can be done by critically examining your worldview with an antiracist lens and how it may impact your learning in this course.” It then went on to lay out a multi-level scheme of how students could complain about their teachers for somehow or other injuring their adolescent sensitivities. I should probably say here that I had not the least bit of worries about any sort of student complaints. Every semester that I have taught, the university has required the students to write anonymous evaluations of me (and all other professors) and with the exception of at most one or two kids per year all of my evaluations have said how brilliant I was, how I treated all of the kids with respect and kindness, how I was always available and happy to help them individually with any of the materials we were covering in class, and how I’d helped many of them with personal problems not directly related to the course or the course work. I’ve even had many of them come back in later years to tell me that mine was the best course they’d ever had in college. Just about the only complaints I’d ever had was that there was a lot of work involved in it. As I’ve said, my class is a discussion class and we read and talk and write about virtually all of the main educational theorists from Plato and Aristotle to Horace Mann and the most controversial current reformers on both the left and the right. In addition, we work with several very good books by and about contemporary teachers and how they’ve dealt with the problems of teaching elementary and secondary school kids. Now, in the past couple of years, there have been a good many reports published about college students and how they were intimidated from speaking up in their classes by fellow students who were on the left and by Woke professors. I have no doubt that the inclusion and the threat of strong-armed enforcement of these new fiats from the university, my college, and my department would keep a lot of my kids from openly discussing the ideas that the course was designed to introduce and would, further, create a lack of trust amongst all of them. As a result, this would make it impossible for me to do what I have always done: that is, foster the respectful exchange of ideas in which students of just about all worldviews knew that they could speak freely. This makes me very sad because I was once very proud of what I’d taught and how I’d taught and was very glad to be part of the university’s teaching project. In the past few days, I’ve talked a lot about all this with Ted, my husband, and he reminded me that I’d been toying for some time with the idea of doing an education-related podcast. So, in the next month or so, I’ll be starting a podcast. It will be primarily – at least at first – what I’ve been teaching my kids for the past dozen years about Education in a Democratic Society. I hope it will be interesting and even fun. (My students have often said I have a weird sense of humor.) Stay tuned!

A defining moment for me was in Spring 2020. I received an email from Montgomery Belle Academy on Harding Rd. (Both my boys went there.) The school was asking for volunteers to staff a "camp" for the children of MBA employees that were students in MNPS. This arrangement allowed MBA to carry on, meeting all the critical requirements of the spring semester. The Mayor knew this, of course. His son was a student.