#Public School

[reasonsforhope]

"Buried among Florida’s manicured golf courses and sprawling suburbs are the artifacts of its slave-holding past: the long-lost cemeteries of enslaved people, the statues of Confederate soldiers that still stand watch over town squares, the old plantations turned into modern subdivisions that bear the same name. But many students aren’t learning that kind of Black history in Florida classrooms.

In an old wooden bungalow in Delray Beach, Charlene Farrington and her staff gather groups of teenagers on Saturday mornings to teach them lessons she worries that public schools won’t provide. They talk about South Florida’s Caribbean roots, the state’s dark history of lynchings, how segregation still shapes the landscape and how grassroots activists mobilized the Civil Rights Movement to upend generations of oppression.

“You need to know how it happened before so you can decide how you want it to happen again,” she told her students as they sat as their desks, the morning light illuminating historic photographs on the walls.

Florida students are giving up their Saturday mornings to learn about African American history at the Spady Cultural Heritage Museum in Delray Beach and in similar programs at community centers across the state. Many are supported by Black churches, which for generations have helped forge the cultural and political identity of their parishioners.

Since Faith in Florida developed its own Black history toolkit last year, more than 400 congregations have pledged to teach the lessons, the advocacy group says.

Florida has required public schools to teach African American history for the past 30 years, but many families no longer trust the state’s education system to adequately address the subject.

By the state’s own metrics, just a dozen Florida school districts have demonstrated excellence at teaching Black history, by providing evidence that they are incorporating the content into lessons throughout the school year and getting buy-in from the school board and community partners.

School district officials across Florida told The Associated Press that they are still following the state mandate to teach about the experience of enslavement, abolition and the “vital contributions of African Americans to build and strengthen American society.”

But a common complaint from students and parents is that the instruction seems limited to heroic figures such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and rarely extends beyond each February’s Black History Month.

When Sulaya Williams’ eldest child started school, she couldn’t find the comprehensive instruction she wanted for him in their area. So in 2016, she launched her own organization to teach Black history in community settings.

“We wanted to make sure that our children knew our stories, to be able to pass down to their children,” Williams said.

Williams now has a contract to teach Saturday school at a public library in Fort Lauderdale, and her 12-year-old daughter Addah Gordon invites her classmates to join her.

“It feels like I’m really learning my culture. Like I’m learning what my ancestors did,” Addah said. “And most people don’t know what they did.”"

-via AP News, December 23, 2024

[phoenix-reburned]

If you could answer this, put your country/state in the tags, and share this it would be appreciated! I'm an ex-homeschooler from Texas and I'm genuinely curious on what people from outside of America think about homeschooling or if it's even a thing elsewhere

[jackass-democrats]

Keep the woke democrats safe.

[onlytiktoks]

And yes, they first denied it even happened then said it was secret service.

[windybluebelles]

Yknow at school when people will whisper a word and gradually start saying it louder and louder till they get caught?

Yeah, that but it’s the Justice League and the aim is to say it without getting back handed by Batman

Trinity: Very Boring Meeting, Blah Blah Blah

Green Arrow: bogies

Superman: (super hearing) ????

Flash: b-bogies

Green lantern: BbbbbbBOGIES!

Then Bruce leaps over the table

You get the idea

[disease]

High School Typing Classes. [c. 1950s]

[wowitsverycool]

for anyone wondering this is the current state of american public education

[dosesofcommonsense]

The ignorant and uneducated have been purposefully lied to. They’re easier to manipulate.

[usernamesarehard1]

[fru1typunch]

Here's a little post ranting about the Floridian education system and how it fucked over public school librarians this year, from the adult child of one who spent his whole summer helping his poor mom try and keep up with Desantis's ridiculous requests.

Every school year, the librarian always gets a couple weeks with a "closed" library to take inventory of the school's stock at the end. Normal stuff, y'know, if a bit tedious and boring. Scan every. Single. Thing. See what you have and figure out who last checked out what you should have, that sort of thing.

Well, Ron Desantis, in his genius, decided that concept had to be applied to all the books in the entire school to determine if they're "appropriate" (by his batshit conservative standards).

My mom didn't JUST have to do the usual inventory thing for her own library. She ALSO had to do something similar but far WORSE for her entire school's personal classroom libraries.

The objective of this SCHOOL WIDE requirement was to "approve" every book in the school as "appropriate". Every. Single. Book. In. The. School. Not the school library, no, the SCHOOL. All classrooms.

My mom's an elementary school librarian. There's around 1000 students at her school, give or take, and around 50 or so classroom libraries to sort through. And this was supposed to be done over summer, before the kids came back in the fall. Entirely unpaid.

She had to personally approve around 25,000-30,000 books school wide based on whether or not they're "appropriate for kids" (again, by Desantis standards), entirely unpaid, in about 2 months. Keep in mind these classroom libraries had been pre-existing for many years or even decades in most cases, so it's kinda useless to just now care about whether the books are "appropriate".

Mind you, you can't read that many individual books in under two months and then approve them in the system if you tried, even if most were children's books. She spent every single day of her summer, her only real time off each year, logging into the online portal and manually approving books from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, looking them up and trying to determine if they might be okay by the new standards since she couldn't possibly have the time to read them all and check, and again, entirely unpaid on her own. Teachers were scanning in their classroom's books to the system to be approved by her in real time, so she really never could get very far ahead. At most she'd knock out a few hundred a day, which I think is wildly impressive given the circumstances.

Even with all that work, she couldn't open her library for nearly a month into the new school year this August because she spent every school day finishing that approval thing for the classroom libraries for teachers. At least by that point she got paid for it. She was also way behind on getting her library ready for the school year, she really hadn't had time to prepare like normal. It was a crazy stressful time for her all around, moreso than back-to-school time normally is each year.

I helped as much as I knew how to, which mostly just meant looking books up for her or texting back and forth with my friends that work at Barnes and Noble or Books A Million asking if they could skim through certain books that might pose a threat at times, and coming up to the school with her sometimes while she worked on approving books and I worked on preparing her library for "business" again.

My mom was upset because she didn't have time for a real summer vacation, the most she got to do was occasionally visit the beach a few hours away for a day trip. (On one of the beach days, she even took her blessed laptop with her to work on it in the car ride over.) She was in the thick of it neck deep all on her own for months with hardly any time off and no pay to show for it.

It's frustrating because if she were to have approved a book that a parent later complains about, it could mean bad news for her. Again, no way in hell would she have been able to both read every single book, determine if she thought it was okay by Desantis's standards, and then approve every single book within the system. She did her best, but she's still nervous someone will complain.

All this conservative bullshit around books is hurting so many kinds of librarians and educators in so many ways, so just take a moment sometime soon to appreciate your local librarians and public school teachers putting up with this crap. They could use the love. Maybe some strong alcohol. And a big wad of cash, they do a lot of shit unpaid.

And do vote these assholes out of office that are making these poor librarians' and teachers' jobs harder with no additional support or pay.

[reasonsforhope]

"France is to trial a ban on mobile phones at school for pupils up to the age of 15, seeking to give children a “digital pause” that, if judged successful, could be rolled out nationwide from January [2025].

Just under 200 secondary schools will take place in the experiment that will require youngsters to hand over phones on arrival at reception. It takes the prohibition on the devices further than a 2018 law that banned pupils at primary and secondary schools from using their phones on the premises but allowed them to keep possession of them.

Announcing the trial on Tuesday, the acting education minister, Nicole Belloubet, said the aim was to give youngsters a “digital pause”. If the trial proves successful, the ban would be introduced in all schools from January, Belloubet said.

A commission set up by the president, Emmanuel Macron, expressed concern that the overexposure of children to screens was having a detrimental effect on their health and development.

A 140-page report published in March concluded there was “a very clear consensus on the direct and indirect negative effects of digital devices on sleep, on being sedentary, a lack of physical activity and the risk of being overweight and even obese … as well as on sight”.

It said the “hyper” use of phones and other digital technology was not only bad for children but also for “society and civilisation”.

The report recommended children’s use of mobile phones be controlled in stages: no mobile phones before the age of at least 11, mobiles without internet access between 11 and 13, phones with internet but no access to social media before 15.

It also suggested children under three years old should not be exposed at all to digital devices, which it said were “not necessary for the healthy development of the child”.

“We must put the digital tool in its place. Up to at least six years old a child has no need for a digital device to develop,” Servane Mouton, a neurologist and neurophysiologist who was on the commission, said. “We have to teach parents once again how to play with their children.”

Banning phones in schools has long been debated across Europe. In countries where bans exist this is most often confined to their use and do not require children to hand them over.

In Germany there are no formal restrictions but most schools have prohibited the use of mobile phones and digital devices in classrooms except for education purposes. A quasi ban has been in place in Dutch secondary school classrooms since the beginning of this year, but as a recommendation and not a legal obligation. From this school year the directive will also apply to primary schools.

Italy was early to phone bans, introducing one in 2007 before easing it in 2017 and reimposing it in 2022. It applies to all age groups.

In February this year, the Westminster government issued non-statutory guidance that said schools in England should prohibit the use of mobile phones throughout the school day, but that it was for individual headteachers and leaders to decide on their phone use policy.

Portugal is experimenting with a compromise by introducing a number of phone-free days at schools each month, while in Spain schools in some autonomous regions have imposed a ban but there is no nationwide prohibition."

-via The Guardian, August 27, 2024

[the-lorax-mustache]

Thinking about that time in APUSH when the teacher was trying to teach us a lesson about how bad the past was and instead taught himself about how much pressure is put on US high schoolers.

He gave us an account of a typical weekday of a 16 year old girl working in a textile factory in Lowell Massachusetts. We were then to write down our schedule on a typical weekday and compare.

My comparison concluded that she had more of a social life, more free time, actually had a boyfriend, worked fewer hours, slept less, and could get around more independently than I could.

Most other students reached similar conclusions but many of them also slept less than her. (I slept 8 hours, she slept 7, and many of my classmates slept 6 or less) I simply slept more because there was never any caffeine at my house and I couldn’t physically push myself to power through. I paid for this by working 10+ hours on homework every weekend.

After grading our homework he came back the next day with such a look of pity and said something along the lines of

“I had no idea it was this bad. It wasn’t like this when I was 16. I’m so sorry.”

This was over 10 years ago. If that teacher is still teaching APUSH he probably doesn’t do that assignment anymore.

I don’t regularly talk to any high schoolers, but I do keep up with current events. I don’t have a perfect idea but from what I can tell all the problems that were there when I was 16 are now way worse plus a whole pile of new horrific problems, some of which probably cross the line into being straight up human rights violations.

It wasn’t like this when I was 16. I’m so sorry.

[tomcruisingthroughlife]

[tee-hee-hee-i-need-help]

The first sentence that I heard today in Geography:

"Humans are likely to be the first species to send themselves extinct."

Thank you for that amazingly morbid insight into things, Mr. Read.

[allthegeopolitics]

A detailed study of more than 770 teacher strikes in the United States between 2007 and 2023 found that the strikes benefit teachers and classrooms, and have no measurable impact on students. Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, was the lead author of the study, "The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study looked at how strikes affect public school teacher wages, working conditions and productivity, as well as the reasons behind the strikes. The authors found that 89% of strikes were in part for higher wages and more than 50% were for improved conditions such as lower class size and increases in support staff.

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[pheonix1t23]