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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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There has to be a difference between "trying and failing to teach reading in English" and "refusing to teach English at all".

That's true, though in turn it raises a few awkward questions. One of the possible explanations for a bunch of 'schools' that have very long classroom hours and culturally-encouraged out-of-classroom study, yet get these test results is that they're learning to read, write, and do math in another language.

((You can find the ELA and math questions online.))

I don't see a functional difference that society should care about. Either we're ok with public money going to private enterprises because we don't want poor kids going hungry, or we are so enraged by a pack of religious nutters who figured out how to game the system that we are not.

Personally I don't really care which, but I find the sudden surge of interest when the religious scammers are jewish to be depressingly predictable. This article could have been written about any charter school in the country. The NYT is publishing it, and we're arguing about it because the position of jewish people in the progressive stack is in question.

To be clear, I don’t mind state resources going to catholic or Mormon or evangelical or Islamic schools separate from the local public school in large part because almost all catholic, evangelical, Mormon, and Islamic households have at least one working adult.

Generational welfare scammers shouldn’t get catered to by the state, even if it doesn’t cost any more than sending them to public schools. If I had my way, the kids of these communities would get bussed to inner city public schools with high percentages of households on welfare until the community boosted its male employment rate to match the surrounding community.

I'm fine with fixing the welfare laws to prohibit lifelong moochers in the vast majority of cases. I'm fine with banning public funds from going to religious schools.

I don't think it's logical to construct a just-so scenario that lands exclusively on one out of thousands of religious groups. Seems really specific.

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