Thinking on certain issues evolves over time. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was ushered in at the very beginning of the Bill Clinton presidency. It was seen as a huge step forward in military circles. It was acknowledgment that gay and lesbian people exist and were likely in the military. Instead of a witch hunt to ferret them out, we would just allow them to exist as long as they weren’t in everyone’s face about it.

It served its usefulness and ceased to be policy in 2011. After awhile, it just becomes painful for people to shut off a portion of themselves for their own self-preservation. In order to prove that the world is regressing, some prominent right wing politicians are aiming to bring that back again.

Of course, no one calls it that. We use fancy names for it like “Parental Rights in Education”. Unfortunately, the scourge is spreading. Now, nearly half of the states in the country are considering the same bill. I’m sure no one is surprised that Texas is one of those states. I’m sure no one is surprised about who is behind that effort.

In order to get the full picture of this we should return to the original name that the bill was given. What exactly do parents want? Well, it’s hard to tell based on the results of the most recent elections. Generally speaking, the numbers aren’t much better in most school board elections. So, it is fair to ask what parents actually want in education.

While LGTBQ+ issues run the gamut, the issue of same sex marriage probably sits near the core of everything. If we were to use that as a barometer of attitudes towards gay and lesbian people in general, it would seem that most parents would actually be okay with it. According to the poll linked above, 61 percent of those polled in 2019 were in favor of same sex marriage while 30 percent were against it.

It certainly is true that being in favor of same sex marriage is not necessarily the same as supporting acknowledging LGTBQ+ issues in the classroom. However, there usually is a huge difference between what has been taught in the classroom and what people seem to think was being taught in the classroom. Most of the time it is a simple acknowledgment of who teachers are. I certainly don’t know anyone that has pushed a gay or lesbian lifestyle on students. They may or may not have acknowledged who they were by simply acknowledging the presence of a same sex partner.

Kids aren’t idiots. In fact, they are probably more in tuned to this than most adults are. By allowing teachers to acknowledge who they are, it encourages kids to be proud of who they are. As you might suspect, teenagers that are members of the LGTBQ+ community are more susceptible to suicide or thinking about suicide than their heterosexual peers.

As we watched a clip on the new laws (particularly the one likely coming in Texas) my wife piped up and asked a perfectly reasonable question. “I’m a parent. What about what I want?” That has been the problem with school boards for time and memorial. A majority of parents aren’t crazy. A majority of parents aren’t bigoted. A majority of parents just want their kids to be happy and healthy. A majority of parents don’t vote in school board elections. That’s usually reserved for zealots and busy bodies. So, now we force Mr. Smith and Ms. Jones back in the closet and with them all of the teens that were hoping to come out.

There are numerous moments where we take things that we instinctively know, but fail to put them together. I support a World Geography class and in that class we got on the subject of genocide. Genocide is one of those squeamish topics that has to be covered, but it is difficult to give its proper weight with young teenage minds.

For some reason my mind immediately went to South Park. In the first episode of their seventh season they ran an episode titled “Cancelled”. In that episode it turned out that Earth was a reality television show in another galaxy. Different species of animals were thrown together purposely to see what conflicts would arise. As you might imagine, this included the various races as well. Obviously, some of the humor was dark and sometimes crude, but the point was unmistakable.

We saw Hitler do this prior to and during World War II. He took over countries he felt had common affinity with his own. The idea was that all Germanic people should be together and a part of one country. As we saw, it also meant that whoever was deemed not Germanic was to be eliminated. We have seen so-called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, and in other locations as well. The war in Ukraine has its seeds in this in reverse. Somehow, Putin believes they belong together because they are the same.

That’s what makes the desire not to teach our history of racism so mind boggling. If you put all of these things together you get the distinct impression that racism, ethnic conflict, and cultural conflict is actually natural. The battle for everyone “just to get along” is not a natural state. It takes constant effort and if one stops making the effort then they fall into the pit of what’s natural.

Of course, this kind of discovery presents its own problems. One of the hallmarks of the KGB and their tactics is the notion of cultural and moral nihilism. It reduces everyone to zero. You’ve done evil things and I’ve done evil things, so you have no right to call me on my evil things. It’s always funny that our collective mainstream media seems to play the same game in attempt to be “fair and balanced.”

The discovery that conflict is the norm ignores those that deliberately try to move beyond the conflict. All people are created equal with unalienable rights and that governments are instituted among people to protect these rights. Those truths are not self-evident. They have never been self-evident. Knowing this doesn’t make our nation’s founding a fraud. Knowing this makes our nation’s founding that much more remarkable.

Knowing this also means that to get to that state of being we have to constantly work at it. If we acknowledge that equality and peace are not natural then we acknowledge that having peace and equality requires constant effort. It means we have to call out those that are not working towards that goal. That means calling out people who aren’t doing it now and it means calling out people that didn’t do it in the past.

It also means that both propagandists and those in the mainstream media are wrong. There are people that fight their own natural instincts every day and just come up a bit short. We aren’t perfect no matter how hard we try. We make mistakes. There are also those that aren’t trying. There are those actively working against peace and equality. They know they are doing it and are relentless in their pursuits. We cannot treat a person with good intentions and a person with evil intentions the same. Both do the wrong thing, but treating those people the same ignores that they are not the same.

While testing a group of 10th graders for their STAAR exam, I got an email from our testing coordinator. “Congratulations, you have been selected to administer the TSIA tests.” If you aren’t in education you have no idea what either of those two tests are. Many of us in education barely know. In addition to all of this we have three more STAAR tests in early May and the more driven students have AP exams around that time as well.

The TSIA stands the the Texas State Initiative Assessment. It is given to students before they graduate to determine if they need to take remedial classes at a community college before they can take the courses that really count.

Since January 1st, we have taken mock STAARs for the five different STAAR exams, we took a field test for the English STAAR because we were fortunate enough to have the state of Texas choose our school to give that exam. We have administered the SAT, both English STAAR exams, and the TSIA, AP Exams, and the other three STAAR tests will come between now and the end of the school year.

Students are told they have to pass all five STAAR tests in order to graduate. They are told they have to pass the TSIA in order to avoid paying for remedial classes that don’t count towards any degree. Teachers are told that they have to follow all of the rules or their teaching certificate could get pulled or we get drawn and quartered.

It obviously gets to the point where we have to ask exactly what we are measuring. I think all of us get it on a certain level. We want to see what students have learned. We want to make sure teachers are teaching the curriculum. We want to know if students have the skills they need to succeed in the real world. All of these are reasonable points and reasonable questions to ask.

What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on a child. What isn’t reasonable is putting all of that pressure on those teaching those children. What isn’t reasonable is designing a test where students sit for five hours fighting off fatigue and boredom to try to master a difficult test. Apparently, too many students are passing. So, the state is dramatically altering each STAAR test to make them more challenging. This is all happening during a pandemic.

Silly me, but I thought the whole point was to test whether students had mastered the skills necessary to succeed in the real world or in college. Has that changed dramatically in the last several years? Are we really adjusting to the changing times or are we simply punishing educators and kids for cracking the code to beat the test?

Meanwhile, the anxiety gets ratcheted up. A typical ninth grade student (at the tender age of 14 or 15) will take practice tests for three different STAAR tests, will take common based assessments each six weeks in all four core subject areas, will take three different STAAR exams, and will sit for the school day PSAT. That assumes they aren’t taking any AP exams. If you do the math, that’s more than 30 high stakes tests. One might wonder if you have time to do anything else.

Testing is also big business. One is free to wonder whether we really are making education better or simply filling the pockets of some powerful donors. Any good teacher wants to know that what they are doing is successful. We want to know that students are learning and that what they are learning is useful. In many cases, we are capable of doing that on our own or people within our district are capable of designing tests that can do that. They won’t take five hours we don’t have to scare the kids and threaten them. We just want to know what they know. That’s pretty easy right?

… round and round, round and round. The Governor on the bus goes, “screw you all, screw you all.”

Texas Republican Governor is trying to be the cutest governor on the block.

Here’s his mean idea.

Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday that Texas will begin busing and flying migrants to Washington, D.C in response to the Biden administration’s plan to lift a Trump-era policy used to turn away more than a million asylum seekers at the border.

The move is intended to “help local officials whose communities are overwhelmed by hordes of illegal immigrants,” Abbott said at a news conference.

Good Lord, what’s he trying to do? Get Texas kicked off the UN’s Human Rights Council?

Eastern European counties are welcoming Ukrainians with open arms.  And Texas is going to put parents and children on busses to Washington? That’s a 30 hour drive. Who is going to pay for that? And if he send them on an airplane, who is going to pay for that?

He’s just mean.

The so-called Trump immigration reform didn’t do diddle squat except for imprisoning people and separating them from their children (which Greg truly enjoyed watching).  Doing away with them won’t cause a difference either.

It’s election time. Abbott is only upping the levels of meanness of the Republican Party.

Has anybody checked recently to see if Abbott casts a reflection in a mirror?

I think I’ve told you that there have been five examples of voter fraud in my county in the past 30 years that I know of.

One was a guy who voted in two different states in three election cycles and was running for office in one of them. Two were a conspiracy to vote elderly African American people by mail in the Republican primary. Two others attempted to vote twice in the same election on the same day, and one of them went home to change clothes, put on a wig and a baseball cap, and thought they “wouldn’t recognize” him. They all have one thing in common: they were all Republicans. The last two were vocal Trump supporters. None were prosecuted by the Republican district attorney.

And now with Mark Meadows and his wife wanting us to believe they live in a trailer on a remote mountain top, it’s fun to keep adding to that list.

Matt Mowers is a former Trump aide who is now running for Congress in New Hampshire. In 2016, he cast a ballot in the GOP primary in New Hampshire, where he was director of Chris Christie’s campaign.

And then …

Four months later, after Christie’s bid fizzled, Mowers cast another ballot in New Jersey’s Republican presidential primary, using his parents’ address to re-register in his home state, documents The Associated Press obtained through a public records request show.

Republicans are scrambling to his defense, calling it a “gray area” of the law. You know, like there’s 50 Shades Of Gray Travel Tours of the country to vote in every state’s primary in the same election year.  I dunno. It looks like a troublesome display of tomfoolery to me.

And I know this is kinda mean, but if you shaved his head, he’s a solid ringer for Stephen Miller. It creeps me out.