Thanks for the reminder, Dave Zweifel!

Awoke this beautiful Sunday morning in late February wondering what precious pearls the Head Groundskeeper of the Werkes would share with his panting public. He began the day with a stout cuppa joe and the contractually required chocolate biscotti as he took a deep dive into the day’s tranche of high-quality newsprint.

When, what to his wondering eyes did appear, but Views of The Capital Times, helmed by my old boss, Dave Zweifel! Voila! as the truckers say in Ottawa. Today’s blogge practically writes itself! Dave Z’s headline reads: “Again, teachers are roadkill in culture war.” (We’ll post the link when they put it up.) He writes:

There was a time, we old timers like to reminisce, when school teachers were among the most respected people in town.

This aging scrivener remembers such a day as well: one-room school houses and biffies in the back; pledging allegiance to the flag, Christmas pageants, and toy guns at recess.

One-room Oak Lawn School, Town of Sun Prairie 1955. That’s Blaska at bottom right. 

There was, indeed, a time when school teachers were among the most respected people in town. There was also a time when teachers didn’t tell boys they might be girls. There was a time when schools didn’t blame kids for their great- great grandparents. That if they studied and got good grades it was only because of some heretofore undetectable “privilege.”

There was a time when teachers ruled their classrooms and weren’t second-guessed by obscurantist school bureaucrats plumbing byzantine “Behavior Education Policies.” When grades were based on achievement, not identity politics. When report cards had a checkbox for “Deportment.” When parents didn’t fight alongside their kids in school-wide brawls.

Watch Blaska debate the Woke progressives

For Madison school board TODAY 6:30 p.m. Sunday 02-20-22 on-line via Zoom. Register NOW at the link below to get the Zoom link to the debate: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYud-CprzkuHdJGuXrxlEdmX0myERwYoW0n

Who is ‘obsessed’?

There was a time when teachers unions didn’t bully like Teamsters. There was a time when school boards didn’t kowtow to the F-bombers to Defund the Police. There was a time when school boards represented the community: a merchant, a farmer, a real estate agent, a lawyer, a home maker, a retiree. Madison’s school board consists of seven “community organizers” who teach identity politics instead of language. And we wonder why “the black-white achievement gap in everything from reading scores to math continues to be an embarrassment,” as Zweifel writes. His prescription: “That needs to be addressed by the schools’ leaders and school board policies.”

No, Dave Z, it needs to be addressed by the parents. His stated agenda here is  fighting a Republican-sponsored Parental Right to Know bill (AB 963). (Tell Rep. Gundrum you support his bill.) It’s odd that an open records advocate would oppose a parent’s right to know what their children are being taught and their right to opt out of, say, Drag Queen Story Hour for religious reasons.

“These endless forays into the classroom are just more examples using America’s obsession with its culture wars for political gain.” The Capital Times concludes. Um, Dave, WHO is obsessed with culture wars? If not critical race theory, what would you call the Democrats’ lesson plan on “disproportionality” at the Department of Public Instruction?

No surprise The Capital Times sides with the vice chair of the WI Democrat(ic) Party, Rep. Lee Snodgrass, who tweeted parents should not “have a say” in their child’s education unless they home school their kids or pay for private school tuition out of their “family budget.”

Zweifel tiptoes past the Virginia governor’s race, acknowledging only that the losing Democrat “clumsily sided with teachers over parents.”

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The Capital Times is taking the same side over parents but, he would like to believe, less clumsily.

Why didn’t Dave Z mention ‘San Francisco’?