Continuous learning, hybrid learning, and blended learning are terms utilized in defining teachers’ return to school by March 15. Online learning occurred between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and this period where teachers are required to return to school, to their designated classrooms. However, students are granted the option to participate in remote learning.
The opinions regarding the return to classrooms proposals vary, with some vehemently opposing it. For instance, teachers disagree with each other, citing the overplaying their hand in letting students suffer through distance learning. There are also lingering questions concerning teachers’ silence over time, with reasons such as a fear of retaliation and isolation being cited. Teachers point to the fear of their contracts not being renewed and the subsequent “blow back” from not engaging in group think. In my opinion, this is quite unbelievable because this is a free world. Teachers should be heard, and after this, a return-to-work framework that favors them should be put in place.
Those supporting returning to classrooms, especially parents, argue that the right to accessing proper education was violated through remote education. Furthermore, individual learning strategies were not adequately addressed, resulting in the plans becoming ineffective over time. This resulted in substantial learning disparities between students. My opinion, based on the above, is that the option of remote learning should not be granted to students since the learning plans may not work.
In conclusion, I concur that teaching is a calling. Therefore, the debate concerning returning to classrooms should involve heavy consultation with teachers to formulate an appropriate return-to-work strategy. This will require cooperation from teachers and parents, and will be vital through the start of the healing process. However, I oppose the idea that those viewing the task as hard should quit their jobs because we need everyone’s input for an adequate return to class strategy. Therefore, instead of them quitting, they should offer ideas to facilitate learning in a post-Covid world.
Catherine Barrett is an Arizona Governor’s Master Teacher and currently Chair of citizens initiative petition, A Classroom Code of Ethics For Public Schools K-12. You can find her on Twitter @ReadersLeadPD, and on Facebook at Yes4Ethics
By Kathleen Winn, Maricopa Community College District Governing Board Member |
Arizona’s largest college system is experiencing the effects of Covid. Since last March when the college shut its doors to on campus learning and cancelled all athletic programs the enrollment numbers have significantly changed. Across the district enrollment is down almost 20%. This taxpayer enterprise continues to remain on-line and as we have learned this is not conducive for students who attend community college. At the same time GCU and ASU are getting the benefit as their enrollments are up by 7 to 10 percent.
Ironically, the college campus has allowed thousands of community members on campus to be tested for Covid and now to be vaccinated. One board member had suggested “we let people know they could benefit from taking classes” as they had a captive audience waiting in line. They were told this would be in poor taste. So, the numbers continue to decline.
The Interim Chancellor has made many personal changes and has many interim positions serving as college Presidents. After Maria Harper-Marinick was forced out, Leslie Cooper, and the recent resignations of Provost Karla Fisher and Dr. Larry Johnson from Phoenix College, one might question what all the volatility is about.
Many classes require hands on experience that cannot be accomplished virtually. The choice to stay closed has been a costly one for the district and may cost some their jobs. There have been no layoffs like University of Arizona or ASU. Unbelievably the board gave a COLA raise recently. If it were not for mismanagement, there would be no management at all. As college Presidents make hard decisions, the leadership has not committed to reopening the college.
This week the community college is asking to expand some of their programs to 4 years, a bill that was designed to help the rural colleges (HB2523). If Maricopa cannot serve the community by training a much-needed workforce, does adding more expensive 4-year programs make sense? Until this college is fully operational and can demonstrate stable leadership and better enrollment numbers we may want to wait before asking taxpayers for more money. But while they remain closed you can get a COVID vaccine and that is the only way you can get on a Maricopa Community College campus.
Ms. Winn has extensive experience in public service, devoting much her time to combating a variety of causes including senior abuse, human trafficking, crime, homelessness and substance abuse.
The Democrats discovered electoral gold in 2020. They featured a historically weak, senile presidential candidate backed by a radically left-wing US senator. Yet they were able to win a record 85 million votes cast for their unattractive candidates.
How did they do it? They ignored traditional methods of garnering voter support—rallies, platforms, showcasing the candidates and their vision for governing. Instead, they focused on manipulating the election system itself, creating and exploiting ballot uncertainty and potential fraud.
It worked so well that Nancy Pelosi is attempting to permanently institutionalize the stratagems that brought victory with the obvious goal of tilting elections permanently to Democrats. It’s called HR1, the (humor alert) For the People Act.
HR1 would federalize all significant election law, incorporating the most fraud-friendly aspects that made the 2020 election suspect to so many Americans. For example, the bill would greatly expand mail-in voting. Bulk mail voting, by demolishing the chain of custody for ballots, is inherently susceptible to non-detectable fraud.
The New York Times recognized that mail-in balloting makes it “much easier“ to buy and sell votes and renders elderly voters especially vulnerable to coercion and exploitation. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project deemed the “significant cost to the integrity of the voting process“ sufficient to justify ending the process. Yes, ending.
Instead, HR1 blocks attempted reforms at mail-in voting. The bill prohibits states from “requiring any form of identification as a condition of receiving an absentee ballot“ or requiring a witness, notarization or any other form of signature authentication.
Moreover, the voter rolls used for mailing would still be protected from “purging“, i.e. updating. This means hundreds of thousands of ballots addressed to dead, moved or ineligible voters can easily be cast by anyone who found them.
Ballot harvesting ratchets up even more opportunities for fraud. For example, party workers walk door-to-door in selected neighborhoods, helpfully offering to assist residents in filling out and delivering ballots and then submitting piles of completed ballots. No safeguards are present to prevent throwing out unwanted ballots. Naturally, ballot harvesting is legalized without limit in HR1.
Bulk mail voting available to anonymous recipients with ballot harvesting serving as the delivery system turns elections into contests to see which party can more successfully scale up legalized fraud. Any party hoping to win an election would be forced to participate. Possessing scruples against organized vote manipulation would be a recipe for failure.
But wait, there’s more. States would also be mandated to except same-day registration. They would be forced to count late arriving ballots for 10 days after the election. Virtually any effort by poll workers to check ID or verify that a vote is legally cast is prohibited.
Let’s connect the dots here. An illegal immigrant, using his “papers”, could register the day of the election and then demand a ballot. By law, poll workers must comply so long as he simply attests to citizenship. (If found out later, he would face no penalties). Thus he could cast a “legal” ballot that is virtually untraceable.
HR 1 would also require political causes and candidates to disclose their donors. Ideally, transparency would be desirable. In the world we live in, the Left has become very aggressive at harassing and canceling supporters of conservative causes.
Countless workers, including CEOs, have lost their jobs and their voice for donating to conservative causes or speaking out. Since sanctions for advocacy work in only one direction, the effect of forced disclosure would be to further hamstring the Right.
The given justification for all this is voter suppression. Yet voter suppression is virtually nonexistent, a relic of our past. It is difficult to find an interested, eligible voter who is thwarted from voting by the system or anyone who thinks they should be. Registration is convenient and broadly available, while transportation is provided free for potential voters.
In the end, HR 1 may come down to a test of whether our Constitution still protects us from tyranny. The premise is that purposeful voter suppression requires that we legalize fraud potential.
If Democrats can get Americans to believe that, they’re in. Free and fair elections are out.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
Reading, writing, arithmetic…these aren’t controversial topics, and neither should be the education of our children. Kids are supposed to go to school to learn life skills and become productive members of society. This isn’t complicated. And yet, schools are increasingly becoming the primary tool of a radical agenda to indoctrinate children in leftist ideology.
Take the 1619 Project for example. Various schools across the country have adopted a history curriculum centered on this series of essays from The New York Times,which claims that the United States was actually founded on slavery in the year 1619.
But the radicalization doesn’t stop there.
A school district policy in Madison, Wisconsin not only helps children adopt transgender identities, but it instructs teachers to lie about it to parents.
And right here in Peoria, Arizona, parents are dealing with similar frustrations after district officials denied them access to review learning materials that appear to be based on the principles of the Black Lives Matter organization.
In a year that’s already been challenging enough for parents as they’ve navigated through COVID, online learning, “sick outs,” and more, you would think that school districts would seek to build trust with them.
But apparently some public schools are too committed to their agenda.
Thankfully, the Arizona Senate is seeking to create more transparency through SB1058. This bill, which has now been transmitted to the House, requires district and charter schools to post a list of procedures used to review and approve learning materials on a prominent portion of their websites. In addition, they would also have to post procedures by which a parent can review learning materials in advance.
But what about district and charter schools that do not have such procedures? They would have to clearly state this on their websites.
While Arizona law currently allows for parents to review learning materials, the process hasn’t always been easy. And many parents have grown frustrated by officials who block access to curriculum.
But SB1058 would allow for more transparency from schools without burdening the staff. This should be a win-win for everyone involved, except of course for schools that have something to hide.
After all, any school that’s currently featuring the 1619 Project as part of its history curriculum probably doesn’t want parents to know that several renowned historians have criticized it for being inaccurate and pushing a false narrative. And they also probably don’t want them to know that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the architect behind the 1619 Project, has admitted that the whole point behind it is to make an argument for slavery reparations.
But a bill like SB1058 would help bring this to light. And while more work needs to be done, this is definitely a step in the right direction. Parents have a right to know if ahistorical and fringe topics are being taught to their children. And now the House needs to pass this essential piece of legislation to give parents the transparency they deserve from the schools their children attend.
Despite the clearly expressed wishes of Arizona voters that public schools teach in English only, state lawmakers are working to undo those requirements so taxpayers will have to fund bilingual education for foreigners. Experts warned of devastation for non-native English speakers.
In 2000, voters in the state elected to enshrine English only in their government-school system through Proposition 203. Non-native English speakers were offered English immersion to bring them up to speed in the language as quickly as possible.
But now, lawmakers have passed HCR2005 and SCR2010 to repeal those measures. Instead, tax-funded government schools would establish “dual-language immersion programs” for non-native English speakers, allowing them to take classes in their native languages, too.
Immigrants, especially, expressed outrage over the plot. AZ Rapid Response Team Founder Jose Borrajero, who immigrated legally from Cuba, expressed shock and bewilderment that lawmakers would seek to introduce bi-lingual teaching in American government schools.
“It is hard for me to understand why anyone would promote teaching public-school students who are English learners using the bi-lingual method,” Borrajero said, suggesting there may be a “sinister agenda in mind” among proponents of the scheme.
In fact, his own experience as an immigrant “strongly supports” the notion that total immersion in English is necessary for foreign-born students to succeed in America. Without having been forced to study in English — and English only — Borrajero suggested his life may have been very different.
“The most important hurdle for a learner of English, or any other foreign language, is learning to think in that language,” he said, noting that being totally immersed in the language is what makes that possible. “It is absolutely, positively impossible to do that using bilingual education.”
In any case, most experts also agree that the best way to learn a foreign language in a foreign land is by total immersion in that language, he said. Failing to provide this to foreign-born, non-native speaking students will “condemn them to a lifetime of menial, low-paying jobs,” Borrajero added.
English language immersion experts are also speaking out. English teacher Johanna Haver, who taught for two decades and wrote three books on education, blasted lawmakers seeking to erase the only protection available to Arizona’s Hispanic English learners to be able to learn America’s language.
“Let’s not behave stupidly,” warned Haver, who published the book Vindicated: Closing the Hispanic Achievement Gap through English Immersion in 2018 on this very subject. She also noted that federal schemes initiated under Obama were at work behind the scenes, at the expense of students.
Former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas also blasted the effort in comments to The Newman Report. “Their ‘good intentions’ (and we all know what road THOSE pave) will relegate these non-English speaking students to second-class citizen status,” she warned.
Douglas, who now serves on the Advisory Board of Public School Exit urging parents to get their children out of government schools, warned of systemic problems, too. “If English Immersion is a failure it is only due to a system that can’t teach English Language Arts to native English speakers; never mind teaching English to non-English speaking students,” she said.
The bill to end the English immersion mandate passed the Arizona Senate overwhelmingly, with just 7 out of 16 Republicans voting against it. The only “no” vote in the House came from Representative Quang Nguyen (R-LD1) – an immigrant who learned English through immersion. If it is not stopped in either chamber on the next vote, voters will have one opportunity to stop the scheme before it takes effect.
The powerful forces behind the scenes supporting this effort do not have the well-being of foreign-born children in Arizona in mind. Instead, they have a subversive agenda to create a divided America where people do not share the same history, culture, love of liberty, or even the same language. The agenda to divide and conquer America must be stopped.
It’s not every day that an innovative tax reform proposal also results in exposing one of the biggest political lies of the year. Yet that is exactly what has happened with the introduction of Senate Bill 1783, legislation introduced by State Senator Javan Mesnard.
Geared toward promoting small business growth and investment, SB 1783 would establish an optional, alternative small business tax code in Arizona. Under this proposal, policymakers would be able to craft and develop a tax code tailored specifically for small business owners, with an eye at setting competitive, pro-small business tax rates.
Exploring tax reform geared toward small business makes a lot of sense, especially since Arizona recently joined the ranks of other uncompetitive high tax states. Arizona currently has the 9th highest small business income tax rate, 11th highest state sales tax and 20th highest business property tax in the nation.
Catherine Barrett is an Arizona Governor’s Master Teacher and currently Chair of citizens initiative petition, A Classroom Code of Ethics For Public Schools K-12. You can find her on Twitter @ReadersLeadPD, and on Facebook at Yes4Ethics
Ms. Winn has extensive experience in public service, devoting much her time to combating a variety of causes including senior abuse, human trafficking, crime, homelessness and substance abuse.
