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Walk through any school across the United States now and what you will not see are students. What you will see are statements on kindness and anti-bullying supported by teachers.
Bullying, back in the day came down to this: a bunch of he said/she said, tattling, and ultimately, a match in the school yard during lunch or after school that settled the score. If teachers or administrators got involved, it is usually because a parent intervened. In my experience, the favored child was the one whose parent was more active within the PTO. Sad, but true. This left me to settle the score on my own.
“Settling the score” back in the day was not the best way to end an argument, but it got the job done. Enter social media. Everyone has an opinion. Even educators. Some put their focus on the students and keep their social media void of any politically divisive remarks. Other teachers say whatever they damn-well please and get away with it.
This story comes from former 2019 “National Teacher of the Year”, Rodney Robinson. Robinson made some truly ugly remarks on his private Twitter page ever-so-recently, that he since deleted.
2019 National Teacher of the Year pic.twitter.com/0PQTDxos3v
— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) December 31, 2020
Robinson, a teacher in Richmond, Virginia, said this upon learning of his nomination last year:
This year I hope to be the voice for my students and all students who feel unseen, unheard, unappreciated and undervalued in America.”-Rodney Robinson
Yeah, well, many of those “unseen” students are actually more “unseen” now because schools have been closed on-and-off since March but that’s another story? Or is it? Teachers are the “front lines” to our children’s education. They are, in some cases of the marginalized, the one, constant source of encouragement and consistency. They are, for some of these kids, the voice of reason when there is no reason at home. Robinson’s remarks are not out-of-the-ordinary or in the least bit shocking coming from the very left-leaning profession.
Robinson has no one to blame but himself for his irresponsible Tweet. But who does he blame? Conservative “bots”:
Ok bot 😉 pic.twitter.com/F1tuXtOd3a
— LB (@beyondreasdoubt) December 31, 2020
Whatever happened to teachers teaching accountability for one’s actions? Not to mention, Mr. Robinson, 2019 “Teacher of the Year”, teaches at Virgie Binford Education Center, a school inside the Richmond Juvenile Justice Center. Wait, what? A teacher at a juvenile justice center. A teacher who, blatantly, on Twitter, condoned a similar form of violence that occurred when neighbors roughed-up Senator Rand Paul.
According to the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Mr, Robinson was cited as “creating a positive school culture by empowering his students – many of whom have experienced trauma – to become civically-minded social advocates who use their skills and voices to affect physical and policy changes at their school and in their communities.”
Hoo, boy! Empowering students of whom may have been traumatized to create more trauma? To administer beat-downs? What part of breaking multiple ribs and leaving a person lying on the ground is civil? Oh, it was just a “yard dispute”. I guess that’s how they deal with it in prison, huh? So much for dispelling the school-to-prison pipeline in a juvie center.
2019 “Teacher of the Year”, Rodney Robinson was an advocate for mental health services in schools as well.
I want school counselors, I want conflict mediators, I want restorative justice, I want people to come in and actually work with the kids and not just put a kid in handcuffs whenever there is a minor disagreement.”- Rodney Robinson
Counselors coming in and working with the kids would involve teachers coming in and working with the kids, too, don’t you think?
Robinson has since apologized, according to this:
I often preach to my students and other teachers that the mirror is the biggest tool for improvement. You have to look into the mirror and ask yourself reflective questions and be honest with the answers. It’s time for me to look in the mirror and reflect on my recent actions.”-Rodney Robinson
RPSSchools superintendent, Jason Kamras, weighed in on the “heartfelt” apology:
RPS doesn’t condone violence of any kind. Period. Thank you to @RodRobinsonRVA for this heartfelt apology. Words matter – across the political spectrum. https://t.co/aguc2X8hNK
— Jason Kamras (@JasonKamras) December 31, 2020
A slap on the wrist.
The air in the educational sector is thick. I would argue that most teachers align with Democratic beliefs and ideologies and are fundamentally left-leaning. While freedom affords them to say and believe what they want, our teachers and administrators alike, need to have enough bearing to provide and example for the most impressionable youth who depend on them. The stark reality of the matter is not every student has a sound family to fall back on and some of these students, especially the most vulnerable who end up in Juvenile facilities, look to some of these teachers for guidance. This teacher has basically condoned breaking ribs to solve a conflict. And what about taking accountability for one’s actions? No, this teacher blamed “bots”. If we don’t see what is wrong with this picture, we are doomed.
Robinson’s remark is part of a bigger issue that needs to be addressed across the country. This is not just on the teachers, this onus is also on their administrators. Oftentimes, it is the school administrator who dictates the climate of the particular district and/or school. It is time to hold them accountable for these actions as well. If the administrators are, in turn, encouraging teachers to voice politically divisive remarks on their social media accounts (and doing so themselves), their feet should be held to the fire. Encouraging violence when claiming to “love all, accept all” is nothing but a hypocritical, empty gesture. There is no such sentiment in this world no matter how hard you try. Teachers encouraging students to be “above” remarks on social media and in turn, exercising the same, exact form of passive-aggressive, social media bullying defeats the purpose of all of the superficial anti-bullying campaigns they claim to support. Then there’s the concept of encouraging “education” while encouraging that English language and its use of pronouns has been wrong all along is failing our students. Teaching them that only some people are equal and to call everything out based on race is also failing our students. Haven’t we had enough of this? What kinds of kids are we bringing into the world with this hypocrisy? Educators and school administrators want to be regarded as important? As necessary and essential? It’s time to hold them to higher standards at our school board meetings.
Photo Credit: Wesley Fryer/FlickR/(CC BY-SA 2.0)/Cropped
Welcome Instapundit Readers!
Cameron says: “Should They Be Held To Higher Standards?”
I’m forced to pay for them through my taxes even though I don’t have kids. Yes. And I damn well better get my money back if they can’t hold to those standards.
Ransom Stoddard says: Thanks to teachers unions and tenure they have literally zero accountability. For job performance or off site actions. A teacher in LA was feeding kids sperm covered cookies and they could not fire him. They had to buy him out after his criminal conviction.
Recovering Hipster says: We can start by getting rid of the Education degree…
jerven says: Whilst still in the military (here, UK) I trained as a nurse. I noticed the extreme leftist bias in that profession, education and others. The most extreme (here) were social workers and I wondered …
At first I assumed only leftists obtained posts/promotions in The NHS (via lefty administrators and HR) – demonstrably true. But it goes further.
It’s not just that those seeking professional registration must demonstrate allegiance/commitment to the left – demonstrably true.
It’s not even that any seeking professional qualifications in the area at university are indoctrinated into the cult – again demonstrably true.
It’s that to even be accepted to study for those qualifications, gain entrance to foundational courses, they must already be part of the woke left movement.
We normals assume, naively, that at worst what is happening is corrupt bias in hiring, when in fact it is root to branch corruption (from the cradle).
It’s worse even than that.
We’re all aware of the patent, extreme, bias against boys in the classroom (from kindergarten upwards). It’s never been that girls are ‘getting better’, it’s that boys are systematically browbeaten and penalised. What we need to expose is that there is a parallel penalisation of any child not showing sufficient acceptance/fervour for the cult. Those ‘not sufficiently educated’ get bad reports and marked down, so never even have the chance to progress and even consider such a career.
It’s not that teaching, social work, etc. give preference to, only employ, indoctrinate, filter out anyone not, leftist. It’s that everyone else is having their life destroyed, from childhood onward, to enable the putsch.
The worst (catastrophic) mistake made was allowing the leftist takeover of education (it’s no surprise that every lefty terrorist, extreme feminist, gay rights and marxist ‘all’ ended up being … ‘educators’).
You can assume that this idiot is merely an extreme example of the profession. Or you can recognise that he’s merely (like Biden) ‘accidentally’ let slip the true feelings/beliefs of the entire profession.
We laugh, and dismiss, teachers as academic morons. The lowest of the low, with even ‘studies’ degrees requiring higher grades and standards. But this is an incorrect assumption. The EdD’s are the extremists. We are judging them on academic rigour, they judge themselves on political fervour. They are primarily ‘political’ commissars.
The fact is there aren’t ‘any’ normal teachers. There haven’t been any for decades.
(We’ve all had that ‘one good teacher’ but, but, but … scratch the surface and she – because it has to be a she because what kind of pervert man would want to work/be trusted with children – unless he belongs to a favoured ethnicity or the lavender mafia when it becomes not just acceptable, but de rigeur – will be revealed as just another marxist/feminist).
All these institutions are long gone. The culture war was lost long ago. Politicians, bureaucrats, administrators, journalists, celebrities are all ‘downstream’, irrelevant, merely a symptom. When the teaching profession was taken over it was game over.
NTSOG says: “The most extreme (here) were social workers and I wondered…”
40+ years working in the disability education/welfare sector in Australia taught me the truth of that statement. I was a specialist physical educator who worked as a behaviour management specialist with the most violent clients: there are real benefits to being fit and strong. Being a physical educator I was considered to be more or less stupid, but useful as the social work folks were generally terrified of violent clients and frequently played ‘pass the parcel’, i.e. looked for ways to get difficult clients off their case lists. [There is real snobbery amongst teachers and also welfare folks: teachers of humanities and science and welfare ‘professionals’ consider themselves superior to those who teach practical courses such as wood and metal work with Phys. Eds. at the bottom of the heap. Therapists and psychologists are also ‘acceptable’.] The attitude of the social work mob towards me was often very nasty as they didn’t cope with an autistic adult who was a very competent professional. They were happy to have autistic people as their clients, but to accept an autistic as a professional equal was not to their liking. Hence these caring/sharing SW folk often made my life difficult.
With the rampant, bigoted Left you are either in the ‘club’ or you are out. I found many of the SW mob to be just plain nasty people.
Please don’t judge all teachers on the Leftist antics of the vocal ones. Many of us honestly have a passion for teaching; it’s just that, if they are not the favored color/sex/politics, their work will be ignored.
I taught several generations of students science; yes, I taught SCIENCE, not the student (they may have learned other life lessons from me, but the science was what I was paid to teach).
I was surrounded by good to excellent teachers; however, their job security and rewards in the systems depended on their color/sex/politics (CSP). If they were inconveniently categorized, they learned to put someone on the team that checked all the right boxes. That person, inevitably, would become the “face” for their work, when it became recognized.
Many of the best teachers were street-wise or of a Deplorable upbringing; almost all of them were White. The Black teachers came from prestigious universities and upper-middle class backgrounds – they did NOT relate to the Black Urban ‘youts’ in the schools of the cities.
So many teachers were just trying to keep their heads down, and qualify for their full pension. The way that teacher pensions are set up, leaving the profession will usually cost you, in term of WEP penalties (Look up Windfall Elimination Profits). I’m penalized in my EARNED Social Security check, by about 1/2, due to my teacher’s pension.
Most teachers were the “good kids” in school; they are not generally risk-takers. To expect them to buck a heavy-handed administration is naive.
GWB says: I concur that there are many good teachers. And that some of them are even underpaid (not something you mentioned, but worth noting). However, there are now legions of “educators” that are not teachers, and they tend to run the schools. (They also suck up the majority of the money in those schools, hence the outrageous $$$/student, while many teachers are still not paid accordingly.)
However, jerven is correct: the SJW mentality is inculcated long before getting an education degree, and serves as a gatekeeper nowadays (as you yourself hint at). It is then reinforced in college in the education departments (and lots of other departments). Even if you don’t believe it, you must express agreement, or be considered a pariah.
Public education has, unfortunately, become an edifice that must be destroyed if we are to return to an “educated and moral” society. Much as the Roman church of the 15th-16th centuries, any real reform will have to remove the power of the appointed clerisy.
Mike Mahoney says: Foregoing fisticuffs in the name of civility has been a big mistake. It’s a way for kids with undeveloped social and negotiating skills to resolve problems, learn the benefits and costs of physical confrontation and actually keep a lid on worse violence. In my day we had a coach who took us on the sly to the equipment cage where there were boxing gloves and let us duke it out with some supervision. Boxing, after all, was part of the PE curriculum so it was sanctioned, sort of. It also taught respect for an opponent one may have taken lightly.
GWB says: Some put their focus on the students and keep their social media void of any politically divisive remarks.
Why should their social media have anything to do with their job? As long as they don’t espouse those things in the classroom, why should I care what opinions they have? Social media is a disease in our society, enabling both the frequent and loud espousing of stupidity and the bullying of anyone with “wrongthink”. (Ironically, Mr Robinson manages both, simultaneously.)
Jerven says: GWB
Social media is the alcohol of society. In vino veritas.
Alcohol doesn’t make anyone corrupt, offensive, violent or criminal. Alcohol merely reveals the truth. Someone who is a violent abusive drunk is … a violent abusive person when sober, they’re just better at hiding it.
Social media doesn’t make anyone stupid, abusive or threatening, it merely reveals the truth yet again.
I agree social media is a disease but it also the equivalent of standing in the public square, with a megaphone. There’s a major difference between someone having a quiet moan in a private conversation and someone bellowing at the top of their lungs at speakers corner.
So if a drunk stood there and told you he believed beating defenseless weaker people who merely held different views was right, and encouraging others to do it. Would you be as happy to allow him access to you children as long as he was sober and pretending he didn’t really mean it? I doubt it.
To paraphrase Mike, actions have consequences and stupidity should hurt. My own take? If someone quite happily tells you he believes you deserve to be beaten for disagreeing with him … maybe you should believe him and not assume he’s somehow so much a professional that his bigoted, intolerant and violent beliefs will have no effect on how he acts towards children under his power.
Just sayin’.
Excellent point – these jerks were always ‘that way’. It’s just that social media has ripped off the affable mask.
GWB says: Social media is the alcohol of society. In vino veritas.
In many ways, yes. But, unlike alcohol, where you have to go to your local pub or have a party to demonstrate your stupidity publicly, with social media you can just sit on your couch and spew forth. And, like alcohol, some people are addicted to it – it seems in much larger numbers.
However, unlike alcohol, social media has an audience effect. Lots of people are on social media “liking” the idiots spewing forth. Which encourages the distasteful behavior. Old-style gossips and alcoholics had people who enabled their behavior, yes. But not large cohorts of random people saying “Oh? Tell me more, Gladys!” or bellowing out “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
So if a drunk stood there and told you he believed beating defenseless weaker people who merely held different views was right, and encouraging others to do it. Would you be as happy to allow him access to you children as long as he was sober and pretending he didn’t really mean it?
Sorry, but this used to be the case in our world (though your example is a bit ridiculous). Because these people were drunks at home and were restrained by society in advocating violence be visited upon their neighbors*. Yes, if they were public drunks, they were not likely to hold positions of trust. Now, social media enables every drunk to be a public drunk, it seems.
(* The old “fighting words” defense put a quick stop to that sort of idiocy. The removal of that concept from our society has significantly hampered our ability to restrain verbal assaults. Oh, and social media makes it at a far enough remove you can’t actually use the defense anyway – yet another problem with social media, making people “brave” through distance.)
not assume he’s somehow so much a professional
You have a higher opinion of people in general than I do. I’ve never thought educators were a ‘profession’ and I’ve known for a long time how many of them were not really the sort of people around whom I would trust my children. It’s one of many reasons we homeschooled.
I’ve always known that teachers were regular people and should not be put on a pedestal. And my life taught me long ago not to put any human beings on a pedestal (not doctors, not ‘scientists’, certainly not ‘experts’). I would just as soon people not be canceled for their opinions – since they are like armpits** – as long as they aren’t espousing them in a place where they actually hold authority. That does not mean, however, that those notions don’t lower my opinion of the man. (As all of those bits above have always lowered people’s opinions of those folk.)
(** Everyone has a couple that stink.)
Jerven says: I understand, and even agree with most of, your points.
I’ll admit the ‘secret’ alcoholic drinking at home is hardly unusual but to dismiss my own metaphor I suppose binge drinkers would be a better analogy. Normal(ish) appearing people who when imbibing let the mask slip – the ‘safe’ ability to spout abuse etc. ‘is’ the equivalent to alcohol lowering the threshold of the ‘acceptable’. As to the “audience effect” whilst social media does have that, the equivalence (I think) is maintained since a drunk generally hears only what the choose to hear, or interprets it to fit their preferred interpretation.
I suppose what I am attempting to say is that, as intensely as I dislike social media, I’d rather know the truth of these people. I used to consider myself a fair judge of character, experience has taught me otherwise (the sheer numbers of people I consider demonstrate the clinical characteristics of malignant narcissist is staggering to contemplate. Read the DSM criteria and tell me you disagree).
It used to be that all you could know about someone was from personal, familial, friends and community experience. So many successfully ‘hid’ what and who they were. Now they are cheerfully ‘outing’ themselves for all to see.
For me the major issue is, as you pointed out, that ‘societies bounds’ no longer seem extant, or at least enough to present a limiting factor. So? The obnoxious behavior on social media isn’t the cause, it’s merely a result of the attack (more realistically destruction) of societies norms and values. Is it the fact that an idiot mouthed such drivel, or that he can do so secure in the knowledge he can do so with impunity? More, that any who do raise objections will themselves face censure by those in positions of power.
I may not be able to do anything about him or them but …. avoid them, but at least I know who to avoid (and in this case, home-school as you did).
(If social media had allowed me access to what is now available I would have avoided at least two ‘superiors’ even if it meant fragging them, dozens of colleagues, and run screaming when I met my now ex).
It’s not that social media created these people, they were always there, hidden, able to work their malicious or incompetent wills in secret except to those they attacked. They now are exposed for all to see, and that, as with the entirety of 2020 and the revelations across the board, is worth putting up with a few (million) cat memes.
GWB says: So many successfully ‘hid’ what and who they were.
And that was a good thing, if it meant they couldn’t practice their nastier inclinations. The threat of public opprobrium curbs many of our sins.
or that he can do so secure in the knowledge he can do so with impunity?
Yes. But also very far and wide (via social media).
able to work their malicious or incompetent wills in secret
But often NOT able to actually work their will. Because to do so would have exposed them. Some could, yes.
I agree that the replacement of one religion (Judeo-Christianity) with another (Progressivism) is the root of the problem. But social media is part of the breakdown of morals that accompany that, imo.
Again, I think social media encourages people who would otherwise keep their really bad ideas and opinions to themselves, or share them only with a few folks. It’s like Winnie The Flu when you’ve already got emphysema and a compromised immune system. It’s not really what’s killing you, but it will hasten things.
Nice to and fro, jerven. Keep up the critical thinking.
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