Texas School Boards are the problem


Just listen to this Texas school board member to see why.

He doesn’t want his school district to become anything like the Houston school district, and the only thing he can suggest is the cause of the difference is…Houston schools have a lot of black teachers. I guess the way to fix the schools is to only hire white teachers.

This is the kind of person who poisons schools all across the country.

Comments

  1. Akira MacKenzie says

    I’m surprised that ASL interpreter didn’t walk off the call rather than translate what this pile of Redneck hog shit said. I would have.

    Professionalism or agreement, you decide.

  2. raven says

    Correlation doesn’t tell you anything about causation.
    The Houston school district is also closer to the ocean. That is just as likely to explain the outcomes as more black teachers.

    This guy isn’t very good at thinking.
    White supremacists are always dumb and inferior human beings.

  3. Akira MacKenzie says

    I’m waiting for right-wing politicians to just drop the clumsy euphemisms and openly use racial slurs in public speeches, on the state house floor, in the text of legislation…

  4. raven says

    OT An alert to the website operators.

    Freethoughtblogs/pharyngula has stopped working with Google chrome browser.
    The website appears and then goes blank.

    The only reason I can post this is because I have an old, obsolete browser on this computer that still works.

  5. bionichips says

    Problem is the nut jobs know that a few hundred votes can swing a Board of Education election. It does not take much imagination to know how they get those votes. BOE elections can be the lowest turnout.

    In our school district I really tried to find candidates’ positions – other than their lawn signs and could not. Nothing on the town web site, nothing on a personal web site. I was going blind and having to trust others.

  6. davidc1 says

    @8Is that the reason why? I am speaking to you from my phone because Free thoughtblogs will not load on my laptop.

  7. says

    @raven, for me FtB works just fine in (up-to-date) chrome, so maybe the problem is on your end.

    In the USA, everything about the education from how it is regulated, financed and actually performed makes absolutely no sense whatsoever from the point of view of someone who grew up in Europe. I mean. local boards deciding about what and how has to be taught? What? Local property tax paying for elementary schools? Whatwhat? High school football coach has higher pay than the teachers? Whatwhatwhat?
    Every single element of education in the USA would get a “what?” of total incomprehension whenever I first heard of it.

  8. Walter Solomon says

    I need to start avoiding videos like this. I’m already actively rooting for China against the US. If I continue to see more racist nonsense like this, I might just turn into a double agent.

    America is a failed experiment. We’re collectively dumber than places our ancestors came from, for those of us who aren’t Natives, and created a worse society than exist in those places now. If anything, we should be looking eastward. America is no longer the future; it’s the stagnant past.

  9. birgerjohansson says

    If the candidates know the text to “Tomorrow will all be mine” it is a bad sign. And watch out for tattoos with the number 88.
    If the candidates think the Peacock family of the X-file episode “Home” were the heroes you are really in trouble.

  10. raven says

    I’m waiting for right-wing politicians to just drop the clumsy euphemisms and openly use racial slurs in public speeches, on the state house floor, in the text of legislation…

    You know it is going to be bad when they start talking about the…”Final Solution”.

  11. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ raven

    Well we already have school board members who think we need to be “neutral” on fascism and the Holocaust, so…

  12. Just an Organic Regular Expression says

    Irrelevant side-note: the name CyFair rang a bell with me, where had I heard… oh yes! CyFair was the high school district that produced Nneka and Chine Ogwumike, great Stanford Women’s Basketball stars and now successful in professional sports. Shining examples, one might say.

  13. maggie says

    I noticed this morning that I couldn’t access this site. There was a number in the upper left corner that had something to do with statistics counting. I was able to finally access using InPrivate on google.

  14. Akira MacKenzie says

    @ 13

    Just how far “eastward” do you suggest we look? If we’re talking looking to tyrants like Putin and Ping for examples of governance, then that’s a non-fucking-starter.

  15. CorporalKlinger says

    Reading right now 22.20h P.M. Middle European Time, using Firefox, no problems.
    @Charly #11 @Rich Woods#12

    “Active shooter drills”, armed teachers(?), member of Congress harassing school shooting survivors, T.V.(?) /Internet channels declaring horrendous school shooting fake …
    whatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhatwhat!!

  16. larpar says

    I had problems accessing the site, too. I finally deleted cookies and now it’s working fine.

  17. Walter Solomon says

    Akira MacKenzie @19
    We can try Western Europe for starters. Japan and S. Korea don’t seem so bad either.

    Russia is just another white supremacist shithole so fuck them. China has many problems, e.g. they’re undoubtedly authoritarian human rights abusers, but their central planning and primary education system is superior to America’s.

    To summarize, instead of viewing a country by whatever strongman is currently in power, we look at what they’re doing better than we are and use it to improve ourselves. That isn’t too much to ask.

  18. whheydt says

    Re: bionichips @ #7…
    The election materials often list occupation and if there are candidate statements, you can check what they think is good about themselves. If they go on about their religious activities, I put them at the bottom of the list of possible choices. Often below even “None of the above”. (I really wish the ability to pick “none of the above” would spread beyond Nevada and that choosing that would eliminate all the candidates running in favor of a new election without any of them being eligible.)

  19. leerudolph says

    raven @4: “The Houston school district is also closer to the ocean. That is just as likely to explain the outcomes as more black teachers.” I believe I recall that there are parts of Greater Houston that are very, very polluted (the same vague patch of memories suggests that the vicinity of the Houston Ship Canal is one of them, one end of which I assume is very close to the ocean indeed). That might be relevant.

  20. raven says

    FTB still doesn’t work with Google Chrome.
    It does work with Google Chrome in Incognito mode though.

    I’m sure it is something simple with the web site and I’m sure I have no idea what it could be.

  21. beholder says

    @26 raven

    It does work with Google Chrome in Incognito mode though.

    It’s probably too much clutter in your browser cache. Clearing the history selectively should do the trick.

    You can do other tests like double-checking the certificate chain with openssl’s secure client to make sure it isn’t the website’s end, or connecting with Tor to make sure your ISP isn’t playing tricks with connectivity, but it’s likely your browser.

  22. khms says

    FtB works just fine for me in Google Chrome Version 97.0.4692.71 (Offizieller Build) (64-Bit)
    … in Linux.

    Texas Schoolboard … oh, you mean local ones. Because I remember Aron Ra’s run-ins with the Texas School Board years ago, and I don’t think they got better.

  23. christoph says

    I had the same problem at work with Chrome and also Microsoft Edge. I’m using the AOL browser at home, it seems to work fine.

  24. StevoR says

    Also What the actual .. they’re not even bothering with dog whistles now are they? Which is a rather bad sign indeed.

  25. Kagehi says

    @23

    That isn’t too much to ask.

    You are undermining Americon Exemptualism! lol

    Yeah, “we” don’t have a problem with this, but the right… seems to think that what makes America “great” is not progress, but the “great potential” it has to sit on its ass and do nothing, so that everything is perpetually stuck in 1950s TV tropes about how things are supposed to work (even when the actual content of a show, song, movie, etc. is actually shitting on conservative thinking).

    These are people who, literally, get nostalgic over an old 1960s anti-war song, while talking about whether or not they should solve some “problem” by invading another country again. Somehow the song is part of “the great America that once was.”, but the message in it, if you wrote a brand spanking new one would be “commie!”

    Honestly, at this point, regular religious fanatics have less cognitive dissonance going on in their head than a GOP voter or politician, and not just because most of them are “also” religious themselves.

  26. davidc1 says

    I can now post on here ,I went to the google chrome help page and,well can’t really say what I did.
    It had the Freethoughtblogs website in a box and I click on it.Now it works,something about a URL,whatever that is.

  27. birgerjohansson says

    The cool parts of Texas (like Austin) can stay in the union, like the Berlin enclave during the cold war. If the dumb parts want to remain, they have to agree to OUR gerrymandering BWAHAHAHAHA.

  28. birgerjohansson says

    Walter Solomon @ 23
    Germany, Scandinavia, Holland.
    (Belgium has a French vs Dutch -language conflict so they are a bit jingo).
    NOT present-day Britain. The government is dragging it into the Hungarian template.
    I would say Canada, if they had not elected that proto-Trump Harper a decade ago. There are plenty of authoritarians over there waiting to pounce. Also, a lot of luggage from treatment of indigenous peoples*.

    *Sweden and Norway has that too, but to a much lesser extent.