<p>epiphany, I probably agree with you.</p>
<p>My sense is that there is often a small group of disruptive students that potentially hurt the learning environment for everyone else.</p>
<p>erase that “potentially.” They simply do. </p>
<p>I’ll just repeat something I said earlier, I think. In historically low-performing districts, the only public schools that are doing well (raising performance) are those that are radically different from State & district expectations. They are very strict. There is a take-no-prisoners policy about inappropriate classroom behavior. And the definition of inappropriate is broad & publicized. You get to sit in your seat, you get to raise your hand – just like the “olden” days; you get to show respect. You are not Miss or Mr. Entitlement. The teacher gets to expect that he or she will actually teach.</p>
<p>“Then there’s the issue of teachers. There aren’t enough HQT (highly qualified teachers) to teach the kids we have now in the public schools.”</p>
<p>That is the fault of the teachers unions and the politicians who kowtow to them because they have all that dues money to poor into campaigns. Elect your bosses and then negotiate your contract with them. Sweet deal.</p>
<p>In many states you actually have to get your teaching degree in state. Nice way to limit the potential labor pool. Wouldn’t want a Harvard grad teaching in Florida would we? Then of course you only need about 15 hours of college credit in the subject you are going to teach, the rest being education courses. To get a BA in English (or anything else) you typically need 30+ credits in the subject area but you can teach it to HS students with 15 credit hours. Now that is highly qualified ain’t it?</p>
<p>Small wonder SAT scores peaked in 1968.</p>
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<p>And your solution to this is to force everyone into public schools?</p>
<p>I always fact-check higherlead before I get too worked up, lskinner. </p>
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<p>There are over 40 states that have reciprocity agreements allowing teachers to transfer their license from another state to a new state. And all 50 states recognize national certification. And I believe that all 50 states participate in Troops to Teachers.</p>
<p>The main issue that sometimes creates a problem is if it’s a brand new teacher on her own state’s provisional certificate (for new teachers) and wants to transfer, because this isn’t a permanent certificate that indicates that the teacher has passed her state’s probationary period. But even then there are ways around it, including emergency certificates. </p>
<p>You certainly are not barred for life from teaching in a state if you didn’t go to college there. </p>
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<p>Maybe you wouldn’t, but Florida does. They recruit out of state all the time. Their teacher shortage is severe and getting more severe due to the high proportion of teachers who are Boomers and expected to retire in the next 5 years. If you can pass the teacher exam, you have a BA or a BS in a secondary subject area from a nationally accredited university, and you’re willing to work in say, Miami, with 40 kids to a room, Florida wants you, desperately.</p>
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<p>See Pierce v. Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 268 U.S. 510 (1925) (unanimously striking down an Oregon statute requiring all students in Oregon to attend public school).</p>
<p>Pierce wasn’t decided on freedom of religion grounds as the first amendment only applied to the federal government and not the states in the 1920’s. It looks like it was basically decided as an illegal taking of private property without due process. I believe the modern courts have more or less rejected the substantive due process theory that was used to decide the case though the decision itself is still cited with regularity.</p>
<p>In any event the Oregon law that was overturned was pretty much specifically aimed at Roma Catholic immigrants and the courts were hostile to it from the getgo. When the courts feel that way they can find “penumbra” “emanating” from the constitution that lets them do whatever they want to do. Craft your regulations tight enough and you won’t have to specifically shut the private schools down. They will just throw in the towel and shut down. Start with making the catholic schools teach that abortion is a constitutional right and prosecuting any anti-gay teaching as a hate crime.</p>
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<p>James Dobson’s outfit tried tricking people into thinking this was possible. It isn’t. The First Amendment protects anti-gay religious teaching.</p>
<p>Hate crime legislation only involves attempts to cause bodily injury. </p>
<p>Snopes did a very nice debunking of the email the Dobson gang was circulating, but I guess some gullible people were taken in.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.snopes.com/politics/sexuality/hatecrime.asp[/url]”>http://www.snopes.com/politics/sexuality/hatecrime.asp</a></p>
<p>“Hate crime legislation only involves physical assault on the protected individual.”</p>
<p>No hate crime only involves what was going through your mind when you assualted the individual and assualt needn’t be physical, the threat of violence constitutes assualt. So for instance while burning an American flag is protected free speech burning a cross is a hate crime. Sticking one in a glass of urine on the other hand is art.</p>
<p>Here you go you can fact check this if you think hate crime legislation is limited to physical assault on a protected individual.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/Harassment/index.html[/url]”>http://www.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/Harassment/index.html</a></p>
<p>For a priest to stand up in a religion class that is counting as instructional hours and tell Barney he is going to hell for buggering Joey is both harassment and a hate crime. If he wants to do it from the church pulpit fine but he cannot do it in a classroom that he expects to be state accredited. We’ll send him the lesson he is going to teach and it will be one that respects the homosexual lifestyle and if he in good conscience cannot teach it then he will just have to shutdown.</p>
<p>Additionally the state has a vested interest in assuring its children don’t grow up thinking there is any science behind creationism. Al Gore is feeding them enough bogus science with his human caused global warming nonsense already.</p>
<p>Then of course there is nothing that says I cannot tax private schools to death either is there? I’m going to need a lot of inspectors to make sure these schools aren’t poisoning kids bodies or minds and it is only appropriate that the schools pay for this state service through taxes.</p>
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<p>That’s true. But now it does. Which makes it even more inevitable that your proposed law would be thrown out.</p>
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<p>So you think that Pierce is no longer good law? Cite, please!!!</p>
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<p>Either that or they’ll run into federal court and get an injunction.</p>
<p>Anyway, you never answered my earlier question:</p>
<p>How do you keep people from simply moving out of the state?</p>
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<p>If you put a punitive tax on synagogues that was intended to drive them all into bankrutcy, do you think it would stand up in court?</p>
<p>higherlead–are you playing devil’s advocate or just ■■■■■■■■? This is still a free country (no thanks to the current administration) and people can teach their kids creationism if they want to. They can even build an entire museum dedicated to it. This is one of the things kids will have to unlearn for themselves when they get old enough to read sources other than the Bible.</p>
<p>A private school which so invades its own academic content by distorting it to reflect “official Church teaching” may, yes, risk its standing accreditation. But that is very much the exception, and tends to be true of fundamentalist schools on the outlying end of the spectrum, not “parochial schools,” which is the category previously discussed. Catholic diocesan schools (none of which I know are NOT accredited, by the same body that reviews & accredits the seculars in the same region) would never risk such loss of standing. They know that to do so would put them out of existence. That’s for the academics.</p>
<p>As for the teaching of morality, The Constitution protects private institutions to do just that, and the constitution trumps any State “mandates.” Families enrolling their children in Catholic schools are told right upfront what the moral agenda is, and the contract usually includes an acceptance of that disclosure & release. You are signing specifically to be instructed in that morality (the instruction of which is apart from the academics) & are told that you should not seek an education there if you object to that, as there is nothing “mandated” about attending a private school.</p>
<p>Neither the Church nor that Church’s school would interpret the teaching of the Church’s stand on homosexuality (within the confines of that school & that church, and their publications) as a form of “harrassment.” Respecting general sexual harrassment (secular) law, however, Catholic school administrations often have a no-tolerance policy for personal harrassment of any sort: whether homosexual or heterosexual. The heterosexual tends to be much more of a problem where I live, with all the sexual precociousness of modern youth, & there has in fact been quite a need to enforce that in Catholic schools I’m familiar with, including on the middle school level. There have also been some homosexual incidents; initially the schools can be in denial about them, & have been slower to respond to these than to the heterosexual variety, but respond they did. (The harrassment can take the form of either pro- or anti-, of course.)</p>
<p>Personal behavior is not formal instruction. Two different arenas.</p>
<p>And Catholic schools have been teaching evolution for absolutely decades.</p>
<p>Editing my post of above, neither would the <em>law</em> regard that school’s teaching of the official church position on homosexuality, to those students, as a form of “harrassment,” for the reasons mentioned above. There is absolutely no statutory prohibition against that. And the state’s own department of education has absolutely nothing to do with it, as the school does not, by definition, fall within the regulations of the department. Any private school, secular or religious, is outside of state jurisdiction as applicable to institutional content, governance, message.</p>
<p>Personal behavior is another matter & always subject to the general laws of the land.</p>
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<p>First off, there is no requirement that religious schools or any private school get state accreditation. And I don’t think the Constitution can require you to force them to. We had that fight in this state over what kind of standards the state could set for day cares (specifically, if the state could bar corporal punishment in all days, including religious ones) and the state lost in court.</p>
<p>Second, the religious schools that are accredited do not have the kind of micro-management of their religious instruction that you suggest. The government can’t pass those types of laws regarding the free exercise of religion. Do you think Southern Baptist schools are forbidden from telling women they have no authority to supervise or teach men? Southern Baptist seminaries aren’t even forbidden from denying women tenure on the basis of their gender.</p>
<p>Finally, you’re just plain wrong about the hate crimes. You will not find one priest who has been charged with a hate crime for the speech you describe. As epiphany points out, it’s highly unlikely that a Catholic educator would even say something like that, but it wouldn’t be a “hate crime” if he did. It would only be a hate crime if he were inciting other students to be violent.</p>
<p>You cannot find one case of a clergyperson being successfully prosecuted for an anti-gay hate crime for simply teaching that gays were going to hell, immoral, etc. </p>
<p>I do admire your energy to spin these yarns, like no Harvard graduates allowed to teach in Florida (that one really made my day!).</p>
<p>The other thing you’re missing is that as mommusic points out, it’s a free country. If even all the things you could suggest were legally possible rather than otherwise–the voters wouldn’t stand for them.</p>
<p>“f you put a punitive tax on synagogues that was intended to drive them all into bankrutcy, do you think it would stand up in court?”</p>
<p>A school isn’t a synagogue anymore than a country club is. The state has no particular interest in letting you wall yourself… and shouldn’t be giving you a tax break to do it.</p>
<p>In your opinion. But this administration has rolled back many provisions against discrimination. Churches and church-run social service agencies are now allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion, even in programs that receive public funds.</p>
<p>“the voters wouldn’t stand for them, and we have the final say.”</p>
<p>The voters don’t have the final say. The courts do and referendumsand legislatures are over-ruled all the time. The statutes are on the books to prosecute anyone claiming God hates homos and they should be enforced.
Harrasment iks against the law and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation is a hate crime.</p>
<p>“The statutes are on the books to prosecute anyone claiming God hates homos and they should be enforced.
Harrasment iks against the law and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation is a hate crime.”</p>
<p>Whoa, there. Look up the law. Differs state by state, but so far I have not read provisions declaring that “claiming god hates homos” is either “harrassment” or “a hate crime.” </p>
<p>Just a clarification, too, in case you think this is the Catholic Church’s stand. The Catholic teaching is “hate the sin, love the sinner.” There is no current theology in the <em>Catholic</em> church (perhaps in other christian churches) that God “hates” anyone, regardless of behavior.</p>
<p>In order for speech to rise to the level of a hate crime, it must involve more than merely the exercise of free speech, however unpleasant. </p>
<p>Harrassment is, again, unwanted activity directed at individuals that goes beyond one’s reasonable legal authority to be involved with or against that person…such as, multiplying efforts at contact, by a business or legal entity, beyond what is called for by that role; such as, unsolicited & unwelcome personal contacts by individuals toward other individuals, etc.</p>
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<p>Epiphany is correct again. Snopes has done a very thorough debunking of this.</p>